Blockchain-based concept for total site heat integration: A pinch-based smart contract energy management in industrial symbiosis

Industrial symbiosis has gained prominence in pursuing sustainable industrial practices, aiming to optimise resource utilisation and reduce environmental impacts. A critical aspect of this endeavour is the efficient management of energy resources within an industrial ecosystem. This paper presents a novel approach to enhance Total Site Heat Integration (TSHI) implementations by employing Blockchain as a facilitator for decentralised energy management. TSHI is an efficient and widely applied method for industrial symbiosis concerning energy flows, which employs the steam mains in site utility systems as the platform for exchanging heat between industrial processes at various temperature levels. It is shown that the synergy of Pinch Analysis and Smart Contract technologies is capable of facilitating energy integration of processes belonging to independent market actors, compared with the currently dominant integration inside a single company. The proposed framework leverages Blockchain as a distributed ledger to enable secure, transparent, and automated energy management across multiple industrial entities in an industrial symbiotic network. The integration of Pinch Analysis principles ensures that the Heat Integration process is optimised to improve the overall energy efficiency. Smart contracts enable automatic negotiation and execution of energy transactions based on predefined rules, minimising the time lag for concluding deals on energy resource exchange and conservation. This paper examines several scenarios to illustrate the implementation of the proposed Blockchain-based TSHI concept within an industrial symbiosis network. It is demonstrated that up to 16 % cost savings are possible by simply enabling transparency via Blockchain. The results could drive innovative development to revolutionise decentralised energy management in a complex industrial ecosystem, especially by synchronising energy exchanges in time.