Development of DOD Process Energy and Pollution Reduction (PERP) Analysis Tool

Abstract

Recent Executive Orders issued by the President set goals for increased energy efficiency and reduced emissions that must be met by Department of Defense (DOD) industrial facilities. To address these needs, the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories has sponsored a program to: (1) develop a Process Energy and Pollution Reduction (PEPR) screening tool that can provide energy and emissions evaluations, and (2) identify conservation opportunities for reduced energy consumption and toxic air emissions via energy efficiency and operational improvements. From an evaluation of the industrial operations at Army Material Command (AMC) installations, five energy-intensive industrial processes were selected, and energy conservation and emission reduction opportunities were identified and collected by reviewing the literature for new technologies and previous energy studies. Energy requirements and emissions were quantified for the alternate technologies and used to estimate total energy usage and emissions for the revised processes. To help rapidly screen these energy conservation opportunities (ECOs) throughout the DOD's industrial facilities doing similar operations, a PEPR software tool was developed to link the energy/emissions evaluation routines for the selected processes with the ECOs. PEPR was developed as a flexible, expandable, general-purpose tool that can accept additional process information and alternate technologies in its database, and can include additional routines to help the user develop input data for specific processes.