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Eastman Chemical Company:

In Practice

1: Make Commitment

Gaining Executive Support

Eastman Chemical Company has a long history of driving energy improvements through its energy program which was fine-tuned during 2011 through the use of  ENERGY STAR Guidelines for Energy Management.  Eastman's energy program is an overall corporate program with broad participation and executive-level support.  The newly updated energy policy was signed and endorsed by Eastman Chairman and CEO.  Additionally, the Corporate Energy Manager meets on a monthly basis with the Vice President and General Manager of Worldwide Manufacturing Support and reports quarterly to the Worldwide Manufacturing Team.  Furthermore, the Corporate Energy Manager also reports quarterly to the Executive Steering Team, which includes three of the eight Eastman Executive Team members.

2: Assess Performance

Dedicated Metering Program

Eastman Chemical Company has a dedicated metering program in place.  The company continues to add new meters to enhance granularity and tracks the progress of meter installations.  In 2011, over $1 million of additional meters were installed.  To gain a better understanding of the factors affecting energy performance, Eastman has analyzed energy usage by site and by utility.  This enables the company to now track energy intensity on a monthly basis.   Energy engineers then analyze the monthly data to determine whether opportunities exist for change and meet with the manufacturing area to develop action plans.

Standardizing Corporate-wide Energy Efficiency Initiatives

Eastman Chemical Company's energy team developed a list of non-capital efforts that could be standardized corporate-wide.  The items Eastman identified include:  leaks (steam and air), lighting, metering, insulation, motor efficiency, steam traps, and HVAC.  The company then developed a detailed questionnaire addressing each of these areas and a corporate energy engineer was assigned to each site.  The corporate energy engineer is responsible for providing information to their assigned site and also serves as a contact for the site should corporate resources be needed.  The engineers assessed their assigned site to identify best practices as well as degree of implementation by using the questionnaire.  Eastman found that the repair of steam leaks provided a good example of how best practices can be shared and implemented at other sites and even within sites.  By examining other site locations' energy issues and determining how these were addressed, collaboration toward a common corporate-wide initiative increased.  This type of analysis of data also enabled other Eastman sites to institute similar practices to obtain optimal energy savings.

4: Create Action Plan

Securing Resources through Capital and Maintenance Energy Budgets

Eastman Chemical Company's increased visibility of their Corporate Energy Program allowed the Corporate Energy Manager the opportunity to communicate to upper management that low-risk, high-value energy efficiency projects were not being funded.  The Executive Steering Team agreed to consider a package of energy efficiency improvement projects outside the normal budgeting process.  As a result, a capital energy budget of $4.2 million was established in 2011.  Due to the success of this effort, energy funding has been included in base projections for capital budgets going forward.  Additionally, the maintenance budget was increased from previous years and for the first time in 2011 was allocated to the energy team for their use in repairing steam leaks, adding insulation, and improving lighting along with other non-capital improvements.

6: Evaluate Progress

Identifying Drivers of Energy Intensity and the Value of Benchmarking

Eastman Chemical Company developed a model that quantifies the effect of product mix, capacity utilization, non-manufacturing energy use, improvements made through maintenance work (such as repairing steam leaks and adding insulation), degradation (low hanging fruit grows back) and capital improvements.  By developing this model, Eastman found that more effort should be put into maintenance work and maintaining the gains achieved.  In particular, an evaluation of the number of steam leaks identified ultimately led to a change in materials of construction used for steam tracing and additional staff to manage maintenance for steam piping.