JFE Engineering Corporation has started steelmaking and shipbuilding businesses since 1912 and expanded its field to energy, environment, urban infrastructure and industrial machinery by blending and evolving various technologies.
One of their latest technologies often put under the spotlight is the following facility:
JFE Engineering uniquely developed using LNG (liquefied natural gas) system.
LNG (liquefied natural gas) emits less CO2 and NO2 compared to coal or oil, for which LNG has been attracting attention as a clean form of energy.
"Formerly South Asian countries used to be the exporters of LNG, however, some of these countries started to import it instead. In a country like Indonesia which consists of a number of small islands, boat services are used rather than land distribution. And taking into consideration the limited land space we think that our BOG compressor can be a good choice," JFE Engineering Chikako Nakayama said.
LNG is stored in huge tanks and is vaporized before being piped to a power plant.
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Inside the storage tank, LNG evaporates constantly giving off BOG (boil off gas), which could destroy the tank if left alone, so it has to be removed and reused.
Channeling this BOG into the pipeline requires a large BOG compressor, which consumes huge electricity amounting to 1/3 of the total power consumed at the plant.
To address this issue, JFE Engineering co-developed a new super-compact BOG re-condenser with Toho Gas Co. Ltd., headquartered in Nagoya.
This re-condenser succeeded in cutting the power consumption by 50 percent with just 2 percent of the size of conventional re-condensers.
The technology dramatically reduced "capital expenditure" and "operating expenditure" to maximize the return on investments. It also allows the simplification of operations and made the maintenance free.
"As an engineering company, we believe that we can be the driving force for the era we live in. We think that specially emerging countries, through the use of cutting-edge technologies can enhance their business level and opportunities. While achieving these enhancements we can support emerging countries by providing them with new technologies and that eventually will benefit us as well," Nakayama said.
JFE Engineering puts great importance on participating in making master plans for development in emerging countries and follow up with the business life cycle to acknowledge the results and stand by those countries.
The continuous contributions by Japanese technology help create a society with stable supply of energy across the globe today.