A common theme that will never go away is how to make more with less. One way ethanol plants can identify ways to save resources as well as money is through better data management and analysis. During this year’s Fuel Ethanol Workshop (FEW), Novozymes’ Technical Services Manager, Laurie Duval educated ethanol producers on just this topic in her presentation, “Unlocking the potential of your plant data for profitability.” Duval manages a team of field scientists that are in the plants implementing Novozymes’ products and helping customers troubleshoot their problems. She also works with data analytics and digital customer engagement tools.
Duval explained in an interview with Energy’s Chuck Zimmerman during FEW that many of the plants are just collecting their data and storing it for review later. But if they can find ways to better bring their data to the forefront and analyze it regularity, then they can start to look for trends earlier and maybe catch some problems before they occur and before they cost them lots of money. Data analytics could even create some trends where ethanol plants are actually able to optimize around parameters that can help them make more ethanol or more products. “And that’s really the goal of getting better with data in the plants,” Duval noted.
Novozymes is working with data solutions companies throughout the industry together with their customers, trying to find, on a case-by-case basis, the best way to work with those individual plants and the systems they have to help them improve their profitability.
Interested ethanol facilities can contact Laurie Duval directly or their technical scientist.
To learn more about using data to increase profitability, listen to Chuck’s interview with Laurie Duval here: Interview with Laurie Duval, Novozymes
You can find photos from the 2016 FEW here: 2016 FEW Photo Album
