Energy-Environmental Diagnosis of the Ceramic Sector Companies in the Metropolitan Area of Cucuta, Norte de Santander, Colombia

Abstract

To design an energy reduction strategy is necessary to determine the state of the consumer by analyzing companies’ energy indicators. This document presents the energy assessment of the beehive kilns in ​​forty-four (44) companies, and the energy features of the average beehive kiln are described based on 205 analyzed kilns. The diagnosis was made ​​on the following items: information for energy service supplies, information on energy management, energy culture, process facilities, industry basics and environmental management of their waste and emissions. Based on the data gathered from the assessment is shown a summary that involves the energy indicators associated with the management of thermal and electric power on the companies assessed, these were classified into three segments: micro, small, medium and large. High consumption is associated with using low energy efficiency kilns, lack of maintenance practices and the absence of management of energy consumption indicators. Most of the visited companies (71%) have neither maintenance department nor maintenance plans, besides this, the 97.73% of the population surveyed had no knowledge of ISO 50001: Standard Energy Management Systems and the advantages of their application. As for waste recovery, only the use of waste burning (grog) as aggregate in the dough looked up to 5% and rice husk was used as initiator fuel burning beehive kilns.