Energy consumption in the form of hot water, electricity and gas is a major cost for meat processing plants and is a focus of greenhouse gas emission concerns in Australia. Midfield Meats has signed up with the Greenhouse Gas Challenge program but believes that modern process control technologies utilising electronic sensors and associated management systems offers the potential for gaining significant efficiencies in energy consumption in-plant. Initial discussions with utility suppliers identified opportunities for efficiencies and discussions with technology suppliers highlighted the potential of what state-of-the-art control technology can achieve. This project aimed at capturing benefits for Midfield Meats in the form of reduced energy consumption on-site that could also be extrapolated to other Australian processors. Those benefits were particularly relevant to abattoirs which associated rendering plants may be distant from the processing site and where hot water is not available from this source, although some of the recommendations may be applicable to other cases.

For Midfield the overall goal of the project was to maximise plant efficiency, reduce operating costs, reduce emissions and to free up capital for other improvement projects.