Policymakers aim to accelerate the world’s energy transition. Projected changes are ambitious: for example, over the next 50 years, the International Energy Agency envisages $31 trillion being invested in green energy; global electricity generation will treble, and its combination with bioenergy and hydrogen technologies, could meet about 70% of final energy needs1. These require a strong emphasis on technology and people – especially engineers and operators who design, build, and maintain the installations. This will expand engineering as a discipline and bring new career structures. The Engineering Equipment and Materials Users Association (EEMUA) supports the skills and careers of these people. This international membership body of owners and operators of fixed industrial engineering assets has built decades of experience in sharing technical know-how to develop standards and good practice in equipment and materials selection through to specification and construction. EEMUA’s ‘by the industry, for the industry’ approach has significant practical importance as industry seeks transformation to stem effects of climate.
…over long timescales and service lives
The new installations needed will often be designed for service lives of decades, with engineers and operators expected to maintain broad equipment ranges, in safe condition, over many years. Diligence begins before construction, by ensuring that materials and equipment are of the right quality and sufficiently robust for success in service. EEMUA 224 guidance on risk-based procurement assists here. Once plants are operational, guidance in EEMUA 231 on the mechanical integrity of plant containing hazardous substances becomes critical. Planning for inspections outsourced to specialist third-party providers, and ensuring their competence, is addressed in EEMUA 232 guidance. EEMUA also offers detailed know-how to help assure continued safe and cost-effective operation – for example, EEMUA 230 guidance on ageing rotating mechanical equipment.
A multidisciplined challenge across many sectors
The skills and expertise needed through plant service lives need to be embedded across sectors and disciplines. Equipment required involves mechanical, electrical, and structural considerations applied in sectors as diverse as power generation, gas production, and waste management. As with past challenges that encompass multiple industrial sectors (such as industry-wide efforts to improve safety following major industrial accidents) EEMUA’s approach and real-world focus uniquely position it to support people engineering energy transitions. Through its members’ breadth and depth of engineering expertise, EEMUA helps improve the safety, environmental and operating performance of industrial facilities in cost-effective ways.
Equipping today’s energy transition pioneers…
EEMUA’s well-established specialist technical committees enable all its members to meet and share good practice across sectors, in a non-commercial setting. Sharing relevant expertise across varied topics, they help meet members’, industry’s, and wider society’s challenges. Activities span disciplines from electrical, instrumentation, and control, to machinery and materials, piping and pressure vessels, and storage tanks. Committees are complemented by specialised forums on inspection and testing, structural engineering, cyber-security, and more – with new forums established to consider emerging issues. This work addresses the engineering at the heart of successful, sustainable energy transitions.
New installations to deliver energy transitions will need careful monitoring and control, especially as they deploy technologies that are not yet mainstream. Control rooms form the beating heart of the plant in all industrial installations, and especially in large-footprint power, fuel production and storage settings – assuring everything from a firm electricity supply to safe transfer and storage of flammable and hazardous substances. Industry and regulators alike consider EEMUA’s guidance, such as EEMUA 201 guidance on control room design and EEMUA 191 on alarm systems, essential underpinning to safety and good practice in this area.
…and tomorrow’s green-energy experts
While EEMUA’s guidance is already being applied directly, the scale of energy transitions and their progressive nature mean that expertise will need to be disseminated more widely and new generations of engineers and operators nurtured. A flexible and effective enabler for this progress is EEMUA’s online learning portfolio that can provide continuing professional development and certification, some of which is already required by national regulators. Corporates and others already use EEMUA’s e-learning resources extensively, and many online courses are incorporated into industrial company training, development, and on-boarding requirements. The association’s awareness-level courses cover control rooms, and industrial cybersecurity, process safety management, pressure systems, and more. These are complemented by more comprehensive, blended options in areas such as mechanical integrity, which combine flexible online learning with live tutor-led sessions.
EEMUA committees, forums, and working groups constantly drive the association’s understanding and response to the needs of on-site roles in dynamic new-energy settings. With this understanding EEMUA delivers flexible learning that develops skills and knowledge required and fits the commitments of engineers as they work on real-world energy transitions.
1. International Energy Agency (September 2020), Energy Technology Perspectives 2020