DUBAL’s Board of Directors visits unique steam absorption chiller installation at Jebel Ali site

On Wednesday 24 April 2013, the Board of Directors of Dubai Aluminium, DUBAL, headed by his Excellency, Saeed Al Tayer, Vice Chairman of DUBAL, visited a novel an innovative pilot energy-saving project at the DUBAL site in Jebel Ali.

The project comprises an absorption chiller, built on the rooftop of DUBAL’s Desalination Plant Control Building, which  has assumed the functions formerly fulfilled by the electrically-driven vapour compression air-conditioning chillers used for comfort cooling of the building.

The installation is UAE’s first-ever absorption chiller using waste heat and the first such application in a power plant. A nominal volume of the steam produced by the captive cogeneration and combined cycle DUBAL Power Station is used (about 0.6 tonnes of steam per hour); and the absorption chiller process uses just 40 per cent of the electricity consumed by the conventional electrically-driven chillers to produce sufficient cooling for the same purpose.

This means that the absorption chiller has the capacity to reduce DUBAL’s energy consumption by approximately 626,800 kWh per year.

This equates to a reduction in carbon dioxide generation by about 350 tonnes per year, which is equivalent to an estimated 180 cars off the road per year. The concept can also be used for other applications where energy-efficient cooling is required – such as equipment cooling.

The board members were received by Abdulla Jassim bin Kalban (President and CEO of DUBAL) and members of DUBAL’s senior management team.