📋 Tender Overview
The European Union is the world's biggest producer of glass with a market share of around one third of total world production. In 2019-20, the sector employed 100 thousand people and generated a turnover of 15 BnE. Moreover, the glass industry is linked to major strategic sectors in Europe and worldwide, such as construction and automotive industries. Nevertheless, the glass sector is an energy intensive industry that generates a considerable amount of greenhouse gases (more than 7 Mt CO2/y for flat glass sector in EU 27). Major environmental improvements have been made within the sector, giving rise to substantial reductions in furnace emissions and energy usage. Still, the CO2 emissions linked to energy consumption remain a major issue that adds up heavily to the climate change problematic. Innovative solutions are then needed to overcome the challenge of industry decarbonation. BCP’s strategy to decrease the environmental footprint of this process is to implement and validate at the commercial scale an innovative technology that allows to recover waste heat from furnace fumes in order to preheat batches of raw materials and cullet. This first-of-a-kind technology would save 10% of the total energy consumption of a glass furnace in a float line (30 GWh/y). This would result into savings of more than 5600 t CO2/y for a standard float line (7% of the total CO2 emissions). Led by Saint-Gobain, BCP project’s technology is the result of about 10 years of R&D studies and is the core of an unprecedented waste heat recovery strategy that will be validated in the float line of Saint-Gobain's Glass Aniche in France. BCP is in line with Saint-Gobain's decarbonation strategy, that involves thorough CO2 monitoring across all plants and efforts in substantial efforts in sustainable R&D e.g. hydrogen trials. After this first implementation, the technology could be easily replicated to the other 60 plants of the European flat glass sector, starting within Saint-Gobain Group.
