Our overall vision is to decouple emissions of CO2 in our production from our business growth. Our concrete goal is to reduce our emissions of CO2 to the 2007 level by 2012. One way of achieving this is energy savings in production. We are continuously and systematically searching for energy-saving projects, and an energy master plan has been established for each of our plants. Many savings projects have already been rolled out in our business worldwide.The other major area consists of activities that optimize our energy supply – either by producing or optimizing our own energy supply or by purchasing more CO2-neutral energy.
Energy savings in production
On example, in China we are now producing biogas in our wastewater treatment. We have added an extra step to produce this biogas, which can be transformed into energy for use elsewhere in the production process. There are several possibilities for utilization of the biogas and transforming wastewater into energy will in time be rolled out globally to our other plants in the world. Many other projects have already been implemented such as recovery of heat from production. In the US we have replaced the burner in the steam boiler with a more efficient, automated model that saves energy.
Electricity from wind power to Novozymes
Novozymes and the Danish energy company DONG Energy, which entered into partnership in 2008, have made possible the world's biggest offshore wind farm Horns Rev II and increased the production of electricity in Denmark based on wind power. Novozymes’ goal is to invest in electricity from Horns Rev II corresponding to our electricity consumption in Denmark by 2012. That will constitute just over 30% of the total production of from the wind farm.