AspenTech today launched a new emissions management solution that will accelerate our customer’s sustainability initiatives. This solution gives asset intensive organizations the ability to pinpoint and act on key operational areas with the biggest impact on their emissions reduction efforts. The new solution features AspenTech Operational Insights™, a proven decision support capability that unites, correlates, analyzes and visualizes data from across an organization for fast, confident decision-making on those crucial items affecting emissions.

Companies today are forced to make far-reaching decisions about carbon emissions abatement and about balancing abatement with margins and asset utilization without having an enterprise view of their current and predicted emissions. Where companies do have a good picture of their emissions status across their assets, it is usually through the use of consultants or spreadsheet-based approaches. In both those cases, it takes weeks at best and usually months to roll up carbon emissions data into an enterprise view. Instead, what companies need is a near-real time picture of their greenhouse gas emissions - accurate and current enough to enable agile decision-making.

Additionally, companies struggle to gain sufficient detail, or “granularity,” of their emissions information, to effectively decide which assets and units to focus on, and what actions make most sense. AspenTech Operational Insights provides detailed analytics and models underlying their emissions view, and they can prioritize actions yielding the biggest impact.

Carbon mitigation has become so strategic that there are frequently multiple teams and functions presenting analyses and views of the company’s sustainability challenges and progress to the CXO. Today, different teams such as sustainability (under the CSO), operations (under the site or plant manager), and asset integrity (under the technical services executive) are using different data, different assumptions, and inconsistent modeling systems to develop recommendations. Instead, relying on consistent data, assumptions and models, the CEO and CSO can have increased confidence in the alternatives proposed and make faster and better decisions.

There is also the need for transparency. Multiple external stakeholders, such as auditors, government regulators, activist investors, NGOs, and employees, are all looking to see validated and auditable reporting of carbon emissions and carbon abatement actions. Instead of providing auditors with access to internal spreadsheets, a secure and inspectable digital solution provides a more accurate, transparent, and controllable way of providing the appropriate level of detail to the right people.

A customer-driven solution

To address these high priority industry needs, AspenTech has been working with a group of refining and chemical companies to define what emissions information companies need and cannot surface readily today – to understand how companies would like to present this information to staff with different roles in the emissions management arena, and to see how to ensure that this solution is easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to adopt and maintain.

This solution is creating excitement among asset-intensive operating companies we work with.

One industry player told me recently that, “We are delighted to see that AspenTech is stepping up to create a solution for this key industry challenge. We know you are one of the few organizations, maybe the only one, with the depth of domain expertise and rigorous models to provide the underpinnings of such a solution and turn it into a decision-making tool, not just a reporting tool.”

Benefits of this emissions management solution include:

• An enterprise real-time view and accurate picture of emissions, enabling insight and response
• One view of all operational metrics to optimize among CO2, profit and yield
• Consistent use of the same data by all teams and all organizational levels
• Easy to audit calculations
• An incremental 5 to 20% carbon reduction through operations

We are now implementing this solution with several of the companies we have been collaborating with in these areas. But this is only the first solution we will tackle with AspenTech Operational Insights. We’ll be developing comparable solutions in the near term to address operational excellence and asset utilization and value chain decision support.