Our steel group aims for climate neutrality and adopts Alperia Bartucci's tailor-made strategy: Artificial Intelligence, energy monitoring and strategic CO2 management.
Soave/Lonato del Garda, 30 March 2021 - Steel and sustainability: it is an old-told story that these two would be irreconcilable. Increasingly significant progress has been made in the steel sector in reducing its environmental impact: according to Federacciai's latest Sustainability Report, from 1995 to date the Italian steel industry has reduced its energy consumption by 25%.
One of the virtuous players in the sector is Feralpi Group. The company, which is one of Europe's leading steelmakers for the building industry, has been pursuing the UN's sustainable development goals for years and, in particular, it aims to reduce emissions and achieve climate neutrality. In order to attain this, the Group relied on Alperia Bartucci, a leading company in the field of energy efficiency, and on its Climate Strategy, a mix of innovative services designed to reduce the environmental impact of companies.
Alperia Bartucci's intervention specially concerned the design and installation of Sybil STEEL, an advanced Artificial Intelligence control system for the optimisation of a billet preheating furnace in the Lonato del Garda plant. Its implementation, based on predictive control techniques, has led to a reduction in the specific consumption of natural gas compared to the previous manual running of the furnace and a stabilisation of the product output temperature.
The Soave-based consultancy firm also provided an accounting service for the greenhouse emissions produced by Feralpi in order to calculate its carbon footprint, set up a strategy for managing CO2 quotas and equipped the company with an energy monitoring system, paying particular attention to the provisions of the ISO 50001 standard. Finally, it provided a cost-benefit assessment of energy efficiency measures and prepared the documentation required to obtain White Certificates.
Giovanni Pasini, managing director of Feralpi Group, states: "Integrating energy efficiency into our investment plans is a primary objective for our Group, and our long-standing cooperation with Alperia Bartucci is an example of this. The work on the rolling mill, thanks to optimised management resulting from the use of artificial intelligence, has already delivered major results that bring us closer to an increasingly decarbonised steel industry. These results are consistent with our sustainability strategy, which is synergistic with both the business and the UN 2030 Agenda and ESG criteria, since reducing the environmental footprint brings value not only to the company, but to the entire supply chain, and to the community and territory in which it operates”.
Giovanni Bartucci, executive vice-president of Alperia Bartucci, says: "The highly innovative project developed for Feralpi shows that it is possible to embrace a sustainable turnaround in steel mills too. The results achieved by the Sybil STEEL automation system, in terms of optimising the production process and saving energy in the rolling mill, have strengthened Feralpi's desire to continue along the road already undertaken towards climate neutrality, relying on the tailor-made strategy that Alperia Bartucci is able to deliver".
