Turning up the heat

“Since we moved into the food and feed industry, we’ve done some fantastic projects together with Bühler and achieved significant impacts on CO₂ reduction and cost savings for our customers. The real strength of our strategic partnership with Bühler is that it has in essence been a bottom-up project,” Vyncke explains. “Our teams were collaborating for years before we decided to officially join forces. They already think, plan, and execute as one cohesive unit with the customer’s benefits in mind, and the official partnership is just the natural next step rather than a ‘forced’ decision.”

What’s the foundation of this fruitful partnership? Peter Vyncke believes there is a clear recipe for success: “Have no secrets and be the first one to give. What it translates down to is that we always shoot straight, call things as they are, and avoid losing precious time by beating around the bush. The second mantra we all adhere to is to offer something first, especially when a project is under threat of getting stuck. I learned this a long time ago from a partner in India, and this attitude of being the first one to give only brings benefits. If a negotiation or an installation gets a little bumpy, reaching out rather than persisting on your opinion opens up new possibilities you haven’t even thought of.”

There’s every reason to celebrate the start-up of a new energy plant according to the Vynckeneers. “Lighting this fire together is the culmination of all the hard work everyone has put into a project. It’s also the first day when a customer starts reaping the benefits of their investment. If you look at the installation at City Group’s plants in Dhaka in Bangladesh – one of our biggest common installations so far, which we completed in 2017 – the impact on energy usage and the subsequent cost reduction is staggering,” says Weyne. “We installed two highly efficient steam boilers, each generating 32 tons of process steam for the parboiling plant. When both boilers run at full capacity, they convert nearly 300 tons of rice husk per day that would otherwise be dumped or landfilled. This solves a waste problem and also allows City Group to save 250 tons of fuel oil a day, enabling them to reduce the CO₂ emissions of their parboiler plant by 60 percent.”

The boiler ash is of highest quality and can be further used in the steel industry without any processing. Vyncke’s customers even further purify the boiler ash and sell it to the tire industry as a source of green silica. This is just one of many examples how a circular economy should work.

Johannes Wick looks forward to leveraging the enormous potential this new partnership offers to all parties involved. “We share the same company culture as Vyncke: We’re both family-owned, down to earth, with an undeterred focus on delivering the best quality solutions for our customers. We can now expand our service portfolio along the food and feed value chains and create meaningful impact to deliver on our targets of reducing energy, waste, and water usage in our customers’ value chains by 50 percent by 2025,” he explains.

Vyncke employs 370 like-minded change makers in nine locations. “Today we engineer, install, and start up around 40 energy plants per year all over the world. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of what we call ‘the first fire’ and we celebrate it every time with our customers to share our joy and passion for fire,” explains Vincent Weyne, Sales Director at Vyncke. “Each solution is tailor-made to a plant’s needs, and the fire burns up to 1,000 degrees Celsius to generate between one and one hundred Megawatt thermal (MWth) for hot water, steam, thermal oil, or gas, and one to twenty Megawatt electric (MWe) for power generation.”