We know a lot about producing energy. But we've also made it our business to save energy.
Energy efficiency is one of our most economical sources of new energy. Imagine this: A reduction of just 5 percent in global energy use would save the equivalent of more than 10 million barrels of oil per day—enough energy to power Australia, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Using energy more efficiently makes sense for many reasons, including:
- It reduces carbon emissions.
- It lowers costs.
- It conserves the supplies we have.
Helping Others to Save
We're an energy company with a business unit dedicated to helping others become more energy efficient. Since 2000, Chevron Energy Solutions (CES) has helped clients reduce energy use at their facilities by nearly 30 percent on average. CES customers are schools, colleges, government agencies and businesses, including some of our own business units. We work with our customers to improve energy efficiency and find ways to use renewable power to provide significant energy and cost savings each year. The money saved generally covers the cost of the improvements within a relatively short time, thereby providing ongoing financial benefits for the customer and improved health for the environment.
To date, CES has developed hundreds of energy efficiency and renewable power projects that are saving customers an aggregate of more than $1 billion and reducing greenhouse gases by more than 3 million metric tons.
Opened in March 2011, the Chevron Center for Sustainable Energy Efficiency supports sustainable energy development in Qatar. The $20 million center at the Qatar Science & Technology Park in Doha, Qatar, studies solar power, solar air conditioning and lighting technologies suited to the country's climate and architecture.
Lowering Our Energy Costs
At Chevron, we're practicing energy efficiency.
To help measure our progress, we established the Chevron Energy Index in 1992. Since then, we have increased the energy efficiency of our global operations by 34 percent.
We've achieved these savings in big and small ways.
We created the position of Corporate Energy Coordinator to lead the company's energy efficiency efforts. The coordinator develops and improves best practices that can be shared among business units and conducts energy reviews to assist in prioritizing conservation opportunities across the company.
We've also invested in projects to reduce the amount of energy we use in our operations.
In 2011, our Chevron Park headquarters in San Ramon, California, earned Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification in the Existing Buildings Operations & Maintenance category. Also in 2011, one of our downtown Houston facilities earned LEED gold certification in Commercial Interiors. Our other facility in downtown Houston earned silver-level certification in 2010. Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, LEED is an internationally recognized certification system that verifies a building or community was designed and built to be environmentally sustainable.
The people of Chevron make energy efficiency a constant priority. We do it with simple, everyday acts, such as constantly maintaining our equipment so that it runs smoothly, and with complex projects, such as building high-efficiency power plants.
Generating Electricity More Efficiently
Worldwide, Chevron operates cogeneration units at refineries, production facilities and other sites, with a combined electrical generating capacity of about 3,500 megawatts. Cogeneration is a fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly process to produce steam and electric power simultaneously. These units, also referred to as combined heat and power units, generate electricity about twice as efficiently as the average power supplied by a local utility company.
Our Kern River Cogeneration Co. facility in California, a joint venture with Edison Mission Energy, was California's first large cogeneration facility, with a generating capacity of 300 megawatts.
We built an $80 million cogeneration facility in El Segundo, Calif., to provide electrical and steam power for our refinery there. We're using cogeneration to produce additional electricity from energy that would otherwise go unused at several of our refineries.
We also developed and installed California's first megawatt-class hydrogen fuel cell cogeneration plant at Alameda County's Santa Rita Jail. The 1 megawatt project provides half of the facility's annual power needs and is saving county taxpayers more than $260,000 a year. By reducing the facility's demand for utility-provided power, the fuel cell plant offsets more than 3,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year.
Conservation and energy efficiency are powerful tools for running our business—and for helping others run theirs.
Updated: April 2012