Embracing responsible emissions management can transform how organizations can impact their assets’ health and enterprise profitability. The opportunity is undeniable. The IBM CEO study, drawn from interviews with 3,000 CEOs worldwide, reveals that CEOs that successfully integrate sustainability and digital transformation report a higher average operating margin than their peers and more than 80% of CEOs say sustainability investments will drive better business results in the next 5 years. This study underscores the transformative potential of aligning businesses with sustainable practices.
As leaders of asset management operations, you need to help your company optimize the efficiency of your assets, increasing cost savings and decreasing emissions. Let’s explore how the Maximo Application Suite can help through operational emissions management.
Unlocking the benefits of emissions management
First, a quick refresher on emissions management. It’s not just about keeping track of greenhouse gases (GHG). It’s about taking control and oversight of a wide range of emissions. These emissions get released into the atmosphere during industrial processes. Emission releases can be intentional, like when a power plant releases exhaust gases. Or, they can be unintentional, such as pollutants from manufacturing. Byproducts, like leaks, effluents, waste oil and hazardous waste, result from these processes.
Optimizing assets and identifying emerging issues early on help in producing fewer byproducts, as well as increasing the lifespan of your critical assets. And, by minimizing waste and hazardous materials, you are promoting a safer and cleaner environment.
Beyond environmental responsibility, emissions management improves the bottom line through operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and safer working environments. Let’s examine each of these in a little more detail.
Theme 1: Strategic planning and operational efficiency
First, with strategic maintenance planning you can drive significant cost savings. Efficient assets boast extended lifespans and improved reliability and performance and ensure uninterrupted production. For example, Sund and Baelt automated their inspection work to monitor and manage its critical infrastructures to help them reduce time and costs. With a better understanding of asset health and the risks to address with proactive maintenance, Sund & Baelt estimates that they can increase the lifetime of bridges, tunnels and other assets while decreasing their total carbon footprint Establishing common sustainability goals also encourages collaboration among siloed departments. These silos often include operations, safety, and maintenance. Fostering collaboration will help you better lead future asset management programs driving a culture of reliability and sustainability across your organization.
Theme 2: Compliance and fines
Regulatory bodies, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), set stringent standards that companies must meet. Emissions management plays a pivotal role in ensuring compliance, enabling organizations to trace issues and their resolutions. This fosters greater accountability within the company, driving a culture of responsibility and transparency. Non-compliance results in rapid accumulation of fines, emphasizing the importance of regulation adherence. For example, to help protect the stratospheric ozone and reduce the risks of climate change, the EPA has levied millions of dollars of fines to companies that mismanage emissions under the Clean Air Act. In 2015, the EPA entered a settlement for environmental violations with a copper smelter in Hayden, Arizona. The settlement agreement required the violator to spend an estimated $150 million to come into compliance with regulations, pay a $4.5 million penalty, and was required to spend $9 million on supplementary projects.
In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act amended the Clean Air Act, and introduced new fines for methane leaks starting at $900 per metric ton of methane emissions in 2024, rising to $1,500 by 2026. According to the Congressional Research Service, this affects over 2,000 facilities in the petroleum and natural gas industry, and is expected to see fines of $1.1 billion levied in 2026, rising to $1.8 billion in 2028.This would see the average facility being hit with fines of $800,000 per year.
Theme 3: Operational health and working environment
Emissions management efforts contribute significantly to establishing a safe working environment. By reducing exposure to hazardous substances promote better air quality reducing health risks and positively impacting the well-being of workers. Complying with occupational health and safety standards is essential for creating a workplace that prioritizes employee safety and meets regulatory requirements. Managing and monitoring emissions further reduce the likelihood of accidents and incidents. Additionally, emissions management includes developing strategies for handling emergencies related to hazardous materials. As stated by VPI “There are always inherent dangers, but you can make them safe places to work by employing a robust and efficient maintenance strategy and safety systems of work”. Having a robust operations maintenance strategy in place enhances the organization’s ability to respond effectively to unexpected incidents, safeguarding employees.
An efficient, sustainable, and responsible enterprise will reap the benefits of a healthy culture. You will attract top talent and become attractive to investors. As more buyers are favoring sustainable and responsible vendors, you will see an increase in sales to this market.
Finally, enterprises that are demonstrating clear progress on sustainability commitments often receive more support from governing bodies. The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, offers significant tax credits for companies that can capture and store carbon dioxide emitted from industrial operations. This external validation reinforces the urgency for effective emissions management. Also, it emphasizes the multifaceted benefits it brings to businesses, society, and the environment.
Better manage emissions with Maximo Application Suite
IBM’s Maximo Application Suite (MAS) is a comprehensive suite of applications designed to improve asset health and reliability. So, how can MAS help you better manage emissions?
Driving a reliability and sustainability culture starts with designing the optimal strategy for your asset operations, placing emphasis on the reliability and sustainability of your critical assets. With Maximo Reliability Strategies, cross-functional teams can accelerate failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) for assets that are prone to emission issues. Your asset operations teams can then apply reliability-centered maintenance strategies to ensure your assets are managed to the highest standards of reliability.
To ensure compliance and mitigate risks, key components in MAS, like Maximo Health, Health, Safety and Environmental Management (HSE), and Maximo Manage play a pivotal role in handling emissions management tasks. These applications deliver operational data capture, governance, safety measures and incident management. In particular, the HSE component offers occupational health incident tracking, process safety, incident management, permits, consents, ID environmental emissions, ISO14000 requirements and investigations.
Ensuring the optimal health of your assets needs a team with a healthy, high-performance culture, empowered with the tools to realize their vision. To turbocharge your emissions management strategy, you can apply Asset Performance Management (APM) within MAS through components like Maximo Monitor and Maximo Predict, which are powered by industry leading algorithms and AI through watsonx services. With APM, you can take a proactive and prescriptive approach to emissions management for even greater efficiency gains and asset health.
Envizi and MAS: Better Together
The IBM Envizi ESG Suite offers capabilities that are key to a comprehensive emissions management solution. Envizi’s capabilities complement the operational excellence that MAS enables organizations to achieve.
Envizi provides top-down management with reporting; MAS provides bottoms-up operational asset management. Envizi offers enterprise and site-level reporting; MAS adds asset-level reporting for full traceability and accountability. With both solutions, you get visibility across the problem spectrum—from the enterprise to the asset, from either Envizi or from MAS. And, you can address issues that surface in Envizi or MAS where it matters—at the actual assets or, even better, avoid issues in the first place.
With the power of these two solutions, asset management leaders can discern how effectively their organizations are performing and operationalizing their sustainability goals.
Summary
In conclusion, leading enterprises promote sustainability, resilience and responsible asset operations. It’s not a choice, it’s a strategic imperative towards net zero targets. Through the optimization of the operational efficiency of assets, you can predict and prevent issues, reduce emissions, ensure compliance and create a safer and healthier work environment across your enterprise.
The case for effective emissions management is clear, driven by regulatory compliance, employee satisfaction, a positive corporate culture and enhanced reputation. In the end, it is about the protection of our future and your enterprise’s bottom line.
By investing in emissions management technologies like MAS to reduce environmental impact and integrating with solutions like Envizi, you can help lead the way for a sustainable future and achieve a more prosperous and greener future for your enterprise and the planet alike.
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