Visualization of CO2 emissions for industrial customers

Use Case is part of the DEUTSCHLAND 4.0 Challenge

Status Quo

Decarbonization is on everyone's minds, the EU has adopted new climate protection targets and the German government is striving to reduce CO2 emissions across all sectors.

 The industrial sector and all companies are thus faced with the challenge of significantly reducing their CO2 emissions in the future.

Absolutely central to this is a sound knowledge of the emissions generated in individual process steps in order to identify the need for action and critical measures to reduce CO2 emissions.

So far, however, there is no uniform standard for the digital visualization of CO2 emissions generated by certain industrial processes and companies - different approaches are used in different ways.

In the long term, a uniform digital solution that can be used by different companies in the industrial sector could make the recording of CO2 emissions throughout Germany more transparent and help to visualize the major levers of CO2 reduction: Savings potentials can be made visible and pursued in a more targeted manner, CO2 emissions can be reliably recorded and broken down across different players.

Question

So, the overarching question is: How can CO2 emissions from industrial companies and their processes be visualized effectively and accurately?

The challenge is to record and visualize highly individual processes and the emissions they produce in a comprehensible manner.

The data situation is often unclear, calculations are often estimated - all this leads to a lack of comparability and challenges in reporting.

In order to be able to cover the range of industrial companies at least partially, two representative types of companies are to be examined in a simplified way. To this end, the project group will first select one of the sample customers mentioned below to create the tool and in the next project phase will test the transferability to the second customer.

1. Public utility company
2. Large industry (e.g. chemical or paper industry) 

For the first customer, a report with basic data is available in the Knowledge Base. From this, a profile is to be created in advance for these customer groups, including the following

• Size
• Core processes
• requirements: Emission scope 1, 2, 3 according to EU standards
• Necessary data e.g. for energy flows
• Etc.

On this basis and the definition of essential assumptions for the customer group, digital solutions for the visualization and reporting of the resulting CO2 emissions are to be developed, which in a next step enable the identification of savings potentials.

Still questions or looking for inspiration?

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Then take part in one of our freely accessible and digital workshops, which we offer throughout this project, and let experienced innovation coaches e.g. from Lufthansa Group show you approaches like Design Thinking and similar methodologies!