Industrial ​Scale Water ​Management at ​Intel

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Industrial ​Scale Water ​Management at ​Intel

To achieve as much efficiency as possible, Intel has sustainability goals that run the gamut from reductions in greenhouse gases, water use, and energy to recycling, constructing green buildings, and making supply chain improvements.

Intel, known for its computer processors, has more than 100,000 employees scattered around the world at 600 facilities in 63 countries. The tech giant is currently one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world, and has the ability to pack more than 1 billion transistors on a chip the size of a thumbnail.

upNzCgP.jpgTodd Brady, Intel’s global public affairs and sustainability director, navigates those industrial-scale challenges, particularly around water conservation and reuse, at its facilities worldwide.

What does sustainability mean at Intel?

Sustainability is all about how we minimize our environmental footprint. I’ve been with the company for 22 years and the foundation was already set when I arrived. Our senior executives drove the focus on sustainability, the environment, and our communities. Good environmental performance and good business performance go hand-in-hand.

We follow Moore’s Law, which is essentially that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every couple of years. To do that, we’re constantly having to invent new technologies, new ways of doing things and, as a result, we need as much flexibility as possible to run our business. One way to gain that is to minimize our environmental footprint as much as we can.

We don’t know what the technology will be 10 years from now. If you are already maximizing all of your permit limits, then you have constraints. On the other hand, if you stay well below those limits, it gives you a lot more flexibility in how you design products and processes. You have more variables that you can consider.

intel.pngHow does Intel use water in manufacturing?

Every couple of years we’re making the chips more complex, adding more steps, more layers. Water’s primary use in semiconductor manufacturing is to rinse the surface of the wafer between hundreds of manufacturing steps. We do that with ultra-pure water that’s been filtered on an industrial scale. As you make the chips more complex, you have more water usage. It gets harder every year.

What are your goals related to water usage?

We set our 2020 Environmental Goals at the beginning of the decade and share progress publicly through our corporate responsibility reports. Our specific goal for water is to reduce the use per unit below our 2010 levels. We’re doing that as we’ve grown our manufacturing significantly. This past year we conserved more water than we ever have — 4.6 billion gallons — through internal recycling and efficiency efforts.

How did Intel achieve that reduction, exactly?

We have a three-part strategy: conserve, collaborate, create. For conservation, there are a number of steps we’ve taken. Ultra-pure water is our largest use of water. When I first started at Intel, it took about two gallons of regular water to produce one gallon of ultra-pure water. Today we’re over 90% efficient in many our operations. We’ve done that through investing in technologies such as very high-efficient reverse osmosis to get all of those ions out of the water.

We’ve worked closely with a team of engineers who run our ultra-pure water systems to continually tweak the process. Last year we identified another 230 million gallons a year of savings that we could get by making efficiency improvements. It’s proprietary technology, but the key is having the engineers focused on finding new areas where we can save more water.

We just built our newest office in India, a multi-level building that received LEED Platinum [certification]. We have onsite treatment and reuse of gray water, so water that comes out of our cafeterias, gymnasium, and even our bathrooms, we can treat and reuse that in a number of applications like irrigation and cooling towers. We also do rainwater and condensate harvesting. In a high-humidity environment, we can get condensate off air conditioning units. As a result, we estimate that we’ve been able to reduce our total freshwater consumption by about 80% in that building.

We’ve done a number of other projects around the world: rainwater harvesting in Costa Rica and reusing industrial water in China and Vietnam. All these different investments plus the things we’ve done in previous years adds up to that 4.6 billion gallons of water a year.

To get water for the manufacturing process, what is Intel’s approach with municipalities?

Collaboration with municipalities is critical. Here in Arizona where I’m located, we’ve partnered with the city of Chandler. When we first built our facility here in 1994, we built a large industrial reverse osmosis plant, which the city operates. A portion of our water goes to that industrial plant, where it is cleaned to drinking water standards, and then it can be injected into the aquifer or they can reuse that water in other applications. We do that all around the world — 80% of the water we use can be reused in the communities in which we operate.

Other executives have said that water can be undervalued. Is this a factor for Intel?

We set aside money every year to do utility conservation projects, whether that’s electricity, water, natural gas. We’ll spend about $35 million this year. Typically you get a better return with electricity savings than you do with water. That’s not always the case, but water is still very inexpensive in a lot of places where companies operate.

The savings I talked about with our ultra-pure water system, all of those projects we implemented this past year had a positive ROI of five years or less. Although water can sometimes be more challenging, we found that there are opportunities. The big challenge is that sometimes it can be expensive to reclaim and recycle water.

What’s next for Intel, and the high-tech industry in general?

We just announced a big investment in Oregon, where we’re building a new water reclamation system. Once completed, it will save up to 1 billion gallons water a year. As we learn from that operation, we can take [that information] to other manufacturing operations around Intel.

There is an opportunity, not just for Intel but for the high tech industry in general, to utilize technology to help the world reduce water consumption. We have a project in Central Arizona with an agricultural group where we’re embedding sensors in the ground to measure moisture content. Today those fields are flood irrigated. By using the sensors, we can precisely pinpoint how much water is actually needed to optimize yields and not overwater.

The low cost of sensors, the ability to collect data, monitor in real time, beam that data up to the cloud, do data analytics, and make decisions based on that is the future of where all industries are headed. From that, more efficiencies will be found. 

Source: Environmental Leader

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