St Marys Cement’s facility located in Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada, has secured the ISO 50001 certification from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) on 15 November  2011, becoming the first plant in North America to receive the rating.

ISO offers the ISO 50001 certification to industrial facilities that monitor their energy consumption efficiently. The Bowmanville facility with a cement capacity of more than 1.8Mta operates round-the-clock, thus consuming huge amount of energy. In order to reduce the energy usage of the plant, manager of plant operations, Fabio Garcia designed an integrated approach strategy in 2005.

Garcia stated that as part of the strategy, the company used the service of 360 Energy of Burlington Ontario and launched an energy management and conservation committee named ‘E=MC2.’ The committee comprising representatives from production, mining, maintenance, quality control, environment, human resource and finance departments discovered and performed more than 100 individual energy efficacy initiatives.

This certification is a testament of the Bowmanville facility’s commitment towards decreasing its energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Jim Storey, the co-leader of E=MC2 and electrical maintenance manager, stated that the facility has saved more than 11m kWh of energy and more than US$3m since 2005. The facility altered its existing systems and designed programs internally to optimise external and internal possibilities in energy administration, he added. With this ISO 50001 certification, the facility confirms that everything is as per plan for saving more than US$1m in 2011, Garcia concluded.