General Electric is helping brewer Anheuser-Busch reduce its water and energy consumption in China.
The companies are establishing an "innovation team" to understand the brewer’s processes and challenges in the country, with a goal of reducing its water-to-beer ratio as well as cutting energy consumption and emissions through increased use of biogas and natural gas.
The team is tasked with defining solutions that can be implemented and piloted in designated Anheuser-Busch locations and then rolled out across the entire region.
The partnership will initially focus on:
- Energy management solutions that employ advanced software systems to provide insight into the level of energy and water used, enabling visibility into potential energy and water losses, while allowing for a better understanding of where improvements can be made.
- Combined heat and power solutions with gas engines will enable several pilot sites to create electricity via either biogas or natural gas. With these engines achieving energy efficiency levels of 70%-90%, the utilization of energy is dramatically improved.
- Waste-to-value solutions that will enable efficient use of water and energy normally left over from the manufacturing process.
Anheuser-Busch has already achieved results in China, reducing water consumption in 2010 by 20.7%, carbon emissions by 20% and energy consumption by 13.19%.
"Anheuser-Busch is striving to make its manufacturing processes as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible," says Jack Wen, vice president of GE and president of GE Energy China. "GE has advanced technologies that can address the challenges of the food and beverage marketplace. Our alliance with AB InBev will enable us to work together to create solutions that will empower the larger brewing industry to achieve these same objectives."
In 2010, GE announced a plan to invest over $2 billion in R&D, technology and financial service partnerships in China by 2012.
Loading...