Industrial Cogeneration Around the World - COGEN World Talks
With Hans Korteweg, Roberto Bertelli, and Scott Yappen
Industrial cogeneration rarely struggles to make the engineering case. The efficiency gains from simultaneous heat and power generation are well understood, and the technology is mature across a wide range of sectors and fuel types. The more interesting challenge is demonstrating that case in practice — showing how cogeneration performs not in principle but in specific industrial environments with specific operational constraints, and how project design can be pushed further than conventional combined heat and power to deliver additional value streams that a standard approach would leave on the table.
The COGEN World Coalition's second edition of its COGEN World Talks series brought together case studies from three continents to do precisely that. The session presented real projects, a trigeneration installation at the Perugina confectionery facility in Italy, a CHP program across multiple Flex manufacturing sites in Mexico, and a quadgeneration project at the Liberty Coca-Cola bottling operation in the United States. Each illustrated a different aspect of how cogeneration adapts to industrial context: the thermal complexity of food production, the multi-site management challenges of large manufacturing portfolios, and the opportunity to extend beyond heat and power into CO2 recovery as a fourth usable output.
The Liberty Coca-Cola project is a useful example of how quadgeneration, capturing and purifying the CO2 produced during gas combustion for direct reuse in carbonation, can fundamentally change the economics of an industrial energy project. For a beverage producer, CO2 is not a waste product to be managed but a direct process input, and recovering it on-site removes a significant external supply dependency. The project illustrates a broader point: the value of cogeneration in industrial applications is often determined less by the headline efficiency figure and more by how well the system design is matched to the specific energy and process flows of the facility it serves.
Cogen World Talks - Industrial Cogeneration from around the World.