 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
August 22, 2005
Environmental Innovation wins Excellence Award
|
|
|
Alcoa scientists in Western Australia have been recognised for their innovative work developing a process that makes alumina refinery waste potentially re-usable – while at the same time opening the door to reducing industry greenhouse emissions.
The project – which is set to become a best practice benchmark for refinery residue treatment and storage in the industry worldwide - won the top award for Research and Development at Friday night’s 2005 WA Engineering Excellence Awards.
Finding practical uses for new and stockpiled refinery residue – which has ongoing environmental and land use impacts and significant storage costs – is arguably the biggest challenge facing the global alumina industry.
But in a major breakthrough, the "Residue Carbonation" process developed by Alcoa has overcome the biggest barrier to residue re-use (its high alkalinity) and done so by adding a waste gas (carbon dioxide) to the mix.
The project opens up possibilities for re-using the more benign residue in areas from construction materials and concrete to soil amendments and even fillers for plastics.
The extraordinary double benefit of potential residue re-use and reducing greenhouse emission follows years of research and the successful construction, monitoring and detailed evaluation of a major prototype at Alcoa’s Kwinana Refinery.
The carbonation process involves pumping refinery residue through a purpose-built plant where carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas – is bubbled through the mix. This reduces the pH in the residue to levels found naturally in many alkaline soils.
While carbonation is a process that is always occurring in nature, what makes the project unique and viable is that the research team has also developed ground-breaking new technology to speed up the carbonation process.
Alcoa hopes to implement full scale carbonation of all residue at the Kwinana refinery next year using CO2 piped direct from a neighbouring industry, diverting those emission from the atmosphere.
This is currently going through an approvals process.
Once implemented, the greenhouse benefits at the Kwinana refinery alone would be equivalent to taking up to 12,000 cars off the road.
The team of scientists and engineers that developed the residue carbonation process are part of Alcoa’s elite global research and development department (the Alcoa Technology Delivery Group) based at the Kwinana Refinery.
The research centre invests over $20 million a year and employs 35 scientists, a dozen engineers and more than 30 scientific and other support staff to work on developing processes and equipment to support cleaner production and maximum efficiency at Alcoa refineries worldwide.
The Kwinana team is so highly regarded that in 1996 Alcoa gave them total global responsibility for conducting this research for all of its refineries worldwide (9 refineries in 5 countries).
Today, they are the western world’s largest refining R&D group. They are also the largest gathering of industrial scientists and engineers in WA, and have the largest number of PhD’s working together in WA outside of a university or CSIRO.
|
|
|
|
