Sustainable Energy First – Boreholes…

The chemical industry is the largest industrial energy consumer in the world, according to the International Energy Agency.  That’s no surprise; fossil feedstocks, heat-intensive processes and complex transport logistics are going to add up to a lot of energy. While business in the industry work on developing less energy-intensive ways of working, there are many things you can do in the short term to cut your spending in this area.

Save with a discount on the CCL

Businesses with high energy consumption pay a Climate Change Levy (CCL) on their energy bills. This is calculated per kWh for electricity, gas and liquefied petroleum gas. The LPG rate is nearly three times the rate for the other two fuels, which can hit the chemicals sector particularly hard.

There’s a way to pay a lot less for this. Signing up for a Climate Change Agreement gives you a discount on the CCL. In return, you make an agreement with the Environment Agency to cut your energy use and the associated carbon emissions. If you meet your target, the following discounts are applied on the CCL:

• 92% for electricity
• 98% for gas
• 77% for LPG

The next opportunity to sign up starts on 1 January 2026.

Have you overpaid?

Most UK businesses have had some kind of error on their utility bill and sometimes the mistakes persist for years without ever being flagged up. That can add up to a lot of extra costs.

Sustainable Energy First has worked with hundreds of businesses to dig out expensive errors and get them their money back. Over the past decade we’ve recovered over £60 million for our clients. It could be anything from a water company billing you for water loss that’s their fault, to an electricity supplier charging you for the wrong tariff.

Our Revenue Recovery experts go back through six years of paperwork (the legal maximum) with a forensic eye. We only charge a percentage of what we get back for you, so if we don’t find any errors then you pay nothing. But we probably will – businesses who’ve had zero billing issues are the exception, not the rule.  The larger and more complex your business is, the more likely it is that you’ll have paid too much because of a supplier’s mistake.

Boreholes

If water is a big part of your utility costs, it’s worth considering an unusual option: drilling your own borehole. It means direct, consistent access to the groundwater – particularly important if supply fluctuations can disrupt your processes.

We worked with a chemical firm that used large volumes of water for cooling. Their water bills were around £600k per year. Looking at the firm’s individual circumstances – including a riverside location – we suggested that a borehole could be the answer.

After exploring this option with our experts, the company went ahead with the project. Even with maintenance costs and customised water quality management systems, they are saving thousands of pounds each year on not using metered water. The decision-makers also believe that the on-site borehole is an asset that will add value to the company’s property in the long term.

Get government relief on high bills

A number of government schemes offer relief for energy-intensive businesses (EIIs). The list of eligible sectors includes many in the chemicals sector:

• Manufacture of fertilisers and nitrogen compounds
• Manufacture of other inorganic basic chemicals
• Manufacture of other organic basic chemicals

Unfortunately it’s not just a single scheme with a ‘one and done’ application process. It’s a number of schemes with different criteria and application windows. Sustainable Energy First work with high-volume energy users to navigate the bureaucracy and get the relief they’re entitled to.

Join a consortium

You don’t have to stick with the standard energy supply contract. The Sustainable Energy Consortium is a different way of procuring energy where you can save in two ways:

• Long-term price security, protecting you against spikes in the wholesale energy market;
• Lower non-commodity charges.

Crucially for chemical businesses, joining the Sustainable Energy Consortium is a way to reduce your carbon footprint without cutting output or changing your processes. You get green energy that can be traced directly to the renewable generation source. So you can make progress with your Scope 2 emissions (from purchased energy) while you work on the trickier problem of direct emissions in Scope 1.

Big chemical businesses like the security of supply (from a diverse range of clean sources) and how easy it makes your Scope 2 reporting. Smaller businesses like the budget certainty and the purchase power that comes from being part of a bigger group. For any size of business, this is a way to lower your utility bills in the long term without necessarily changing anything else about how you operate.

For information about the Sustainable Energy Consortium, or any of Sustainable Energy First’s other services, get in touch with them. SE First offer no obligation advice on how you can achieve long term cost reductions on your utility bills.