Rene Meuleman
Director Business Development
CelSian

Abstract

The best vision is insights

We are at the edge of the introduction of the furnace of the future, running trials with hydrogen and renewable fuels combustion. We are paving the way towards CO₂ green glass manufacturing. It is, in many ways the biggest commercial and technical challenge as well as the biggest change of technologies since industrial glass manufacturing started.

Finding the best technical and commercial carbon reduction solution for a specific glass industry located in a specific region will need multiple disciplines to cooperate. Governments, communities, institutes, suppliers and end-users will have to work together, forgetting for a while competition to be able to leave fossil fuels behind them successfully.

That might sound naive but a recent example from the Netherlands, known as the green circle initiative, showed it can be done.

Large changeovers can be achieved based on strengthening the mutual interests based on equality and balance between parties.

There will be no best single solution and there will multiple available energy sources that need to be considered like electrical energy, hydrogen, biofuels and synthetic fuels.

Each will behave differently in glass melting processes, will come at different price levels, will have different energy efficiencies, will either be freely available or rare, etc.

In the demand for renewables, the glass industry will face competition from other energy-intensive industries and automotive. Predictably, it will become a job to manage all variables, keep the social licence to operate and stay commercially successful.

During our presentation we examine some of the options and have a look at their energy efficiency and technology readiness levels. Don’t expect hard conclusions as we need to keep in mind that those who say that they have the final solution are too opportunistic.