Process Energy Recovery: Flash Steam Project
The Customer
Teys is Australia’s second-largest beef processor and exporter, processing roughly 32,000 cattle weekly for domestic and international markets.Operating across the Eastern Seaboard, the company’s vertically integrated supply chain drives significant national economic contributions, employing over 5,000 people and exporting to more than 60 countries. Teys have 6abattoir/rendering meat processing facilities across Australia including Wagga Wagga.
The Need
The rendering process, which produces meat meal, tallow and blood is a large consumer of energy within a meat processing facility. The Wagga rendering plant uses about 670GJ a day in thermal energy. The process of rendering produces a large amount of waste heat – about 90GJ a day. If this is not harnessed, the waste heat , in the form of steam energy ,water and chemicals for treatment is lost to atmosphere. Up until late2025 Teys Wagga was losing all this energy to atmosphere.
The Engineered Solution
Energy Specialties approached Teys to design a turnkey solution to harness as much of the wasted energy as possible. This resulted in a bespoke Flash Steam RecoveryPackage , fabricated to fit the limited space available . In addition, a vapour condenser heat exchanger was designed to capture the residual waste heat from the vented vapour that was being to atmosphere
The Result
The Flash Steam Recovery Skid re-uses process steam vapour under pressure to pre-heat the16000 lts/hr of boiler water from 98C up to 125C , saving a large amount of energy. In conjunction , the vapour condenser harnesses much of the secondary residual waste heat ,still present after the flash system. The vapour condenser adds secondary heat to the process water , typically increasing the temperature of the water from say 86C to 90C with a flow rate of 22 lts/sec. The result is that the 2 waste heat recovery systems working in series utilise about 3.3 GJ per hour of the energy that was formally lost to atmosphere. This has reducedt he thermal energy per head of cattle processed by over 30%.
