Refinery’s steam savings initiative exceeds goal, gains EPA recognition

Business News

May 28, 2025

MPC’s Garyville refinery further lowered its energy consumption and emissions through a refinery-wide challenge to capture at least 100,000 pounds-per-hour in steam savings and waste-heat steam generation capacity in a year.

Key Points

Marathon Petroleum’s Garyville, Louisiana, refinery surpassed its goal of capturing at least 100,000 pounds-per-hour of steam savings in a year.
Employee ideas drove this initiative, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognized as one of the U.S. industrial sector’s top projects in 2024.
By exceeding its steam savings target, the refinery also further reduced its energy use and emissions.

An employee-driven efficiency initiative at Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s (MPC) Garyville, Louisiana, refinery earned a national honor on the way to achieving its objective. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognized the site’s pursuit of 100,000 pounds-per-hour of steam savings over the course of 2024 as one of the year’s 11 Top Projects in the U.S. industrial sector.

“The refinery exceeded the goal of its steam challenge primarily through documented savings ideas submitted by employees,” said Jay Richert, vice president of refining at the Garyville refinery.

The Garyville refinery’s 2024 steam challenge exceeded its goal primarily through documented savings ideas that employees submitted.

The refinery-wide effort recovered approximately 129,000 pounds-per-hour in steam savings and waste-heat steam generation capacity. This figure generally equates to energy savings of 110 million Btu per hour and avoiding 48,720 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per year.

Engineers in Garyville’s technical services department developed the steam challenge as a means of increasing steam capacity to support the refinery’s process units. The initiative extended the refinery’s long history of promoting best practices and encouraging new ideas that have helped the site remain ENERGY STAR®-certified for 19 consecutive years.

“You could increase capacity by building a new steam boiler, which ultimately will lead to additional energy consumption, or optimize current infrastructure. Because this site values energy efficiency, we elected to pursue the second method,” said Rachel Monroe who helped manage the challenge as a refining engineer.

At the U.S. EPA’s 2024 ENERGY STAR® Industrial Partner Meeting, MPC Planning and Optimization Engineer Rachel Monroe provides attendees with details of the Garyville refinery’s steam challenge.

More broadly, the steam challenge is tied to Garyville’s emphasis on following the Focus on Energy program of MPC’s refining organization. This program’s principles and key performance indicators reflect the understanding that efficient operations are both good for the environment and good for business.

“This challenge provided the same steam capacity benefits as installing a small boiler. However, we captured these benefits in much less time and with much greater energy efficiency,” Monroe said.