Asset intensive industries play a critical role in the path to global net zero, and carbon capture is an important way to make meaningful progress toward their goals. However, carbon capture requires significant capital investment and can be risky without a full understanding of a project’s techno-economics.
Introduced in April 2024, AspenTech Strategic Planning for Sustainability Pathways™ (SPSP) assists teams in developing an effective, long-term decarbonization strategy through the screening of multiple technologies, while optimizing the balance between financial objectives and net-zero targets. Developed through a licensing agreement with Aramco, AspenTech SPSP helps guide asset-intensive companies in carbon capture utilization and storage decision making and sustainability strategy investments. The solution enables efficient decision-making through scenario analysis, providing insights into the lifecycle assessment and taking into account both capital investments and operational costs.
With robust benefits that go so far as evaluating the impact of external market factors and balancing profitability and emissions, refineries, gas plants, oil operations, power plants, cement plants and other industrial sites can identify the optimal decarbonization strategy before considerable investment is made.
The Role of AI in AspenTech SPSP
Industrial AI is central to many of AspenTech’s solutions and its ability to help companies achieve their operational excellence and sustainability goals. It combines AI with domain expertise for guardrails, robustness and trusted results. AspenTech’s Industrial AI domain expertise encapsulates engineering fundamentals as well as the company’s 40+ years of innovation, knowledge of industrial assets, and experience.
Unlike most other AI, Industrial AI is explainable and incorporates built in guardrails that avoid violating the laws of physics and accidentally triggering incorrect recommendations. Disrupting industrial processes can negatively impact employee safety, the surrounding environment or business performance. Therefore, making sure AI systems that oversee those processes are both robust and reliable is important.
Generative AI, one of several Industrial AI methodologies AspenTech makes use of, is incorporated into AspenTech SPSP.
As part of the solution, a generative AI application identifies candidate groupings of process units, or pathways. Then alternative investment strategies are ranked by the broader solution based on economics and carbon emissions avoidance. In this case, the proprietary workflow that governs the retrieval pathway insights from the large language models provides guardrails to the generative AI application. Expert review is also part of the workflow.
With AspenTech’s AI innovation, purpose built for industrial environments, customers can confidently rely on AspenTech SPSP and its AI as a core pillar of their decarbonization strategy. AspenTech looks forward to continuing to support asset-intensive industries in achieving their net-zero goals with AspenTech SPSP and other industrial software solutions proven to accelerate progress on CCUS projects and more sustainability pathways.
