San Miguel Corporation (SMC) has announced that the company would reduce operational water use by 50 percent across its businesses, employing measures that include water recycling, conservation, and rainwater harvesting, among others, to meet this target by 2025.
Coinciding with World Water Day today, the Philippines’ largest conglomerate is taking on its own water sustainability challenge to reduce water usage and educate employees, business partners and communities about water stewardship.
In an effort to further mesh sustainability into its business goals and processes, San Miguel is rolling out an integrated water management system across its entire operations.
Water is an essential ingredient to many of San Miguel’s brands. For instance, beer is 90% water, and liquor is around 85% water. Across the San Miguel Group, water is used to clean, cool, heat, produce steam and pasteurize. It is an important input to raw materials and packaging and major input to the power and oil refining industries.
“San Miguel is going to set an example in its responsible use and management of water,” said SMC president and chief operating officer Ramon S. Ang.
“Many of our facilities are already efficient in terms of using water, but we can always do more. Given the scale of our need, we’re working to become more conscious about our water footprint.”
Cutting groundwater use, recycling, harvesting rainwater
A major component of San Miguel’s water strategy involves minimizing the amount of water it draws from ground water sources, and instead reusing and recycling process water and harvesting rainwater.
The company said it can also utilize surface runoff water (usually excess stormwater) from mountains, creeks and rivers and filter and store these for irrigation.
Ang reports that the first year of implementation will focus on establishing baseline information, data that will then be analyzed to see where the company could improve both, in terms of efficiency and conservation.
Metering and establishing operating standards is the first order of the day. While many of the newer plants have water meters per line and per process, other older facilities need to be fitted with additional meters.
Installing separate water meters will make water audits relatively easier to perform, prevent wastage and improving efficiency.
San Miguel’s newer facilities are all built with smart water usage in mind. Petron’s RMP-2 plant in Limay, Bataan is outfitted with the latest technology to reduce freshwater and groundwater consumption and minimize the environmental impact of wastewater discharge from its oil and gas operations.
Much of the raw water used by RMP-2 comes from the sea via a state-of-the art desalination facility. Desalination is a process that transforms salt water into consumable water.
Built at the cost of R474 million, the desalination plant supplies 25% of the roughly 2,100 cu m per hour total water requirements of the refinery. An estimated 60% amount of the total amount of water the refinery uses goes to its boiler-houses – to produce high-pressure steam that, in turn, is used both to generation power and to process steam.
For Petron RMP-2, further areas for water efficiency improvements are in power generation and the refining process itself. Recycling water is an important aspect of the refinery integrated water management system.
About 67% of the water RMP-2 uses is cycled back into the operations before being returned to the sea nearby. Ang’s challenge to refinery operators is to further increase the amount of recycled water without sacrificing product quality.
“It can be done. With technology in our newer facilities, we have enormous innovative capacity to tackle the challenge of water scarcity and create positive water impact.”