MAHLE – Yue Zhao – 2023

Goals

As a prominent global manufacturer in automotive parts, MAHLE has promised carbon neutrality before 2040. Striving for this ambitious target, MAHLE involved Yue Zhao in plant energy efficiency improving, since plants are key energy consumers. Meanwhile, MAHLE has shown great interest in picturing and reducing carbon emission from supply chain, which predominates in Scope 3 carbon emission of MAHLE.

Solutions

To promote effective energy management in plants, Yue quickly acquainted company’s current production investigating project and practiced the principles as well as methods on site. Yue assessed several evitable energy usages, and, learning from this experience, Yue improve current processes to achieve a progress in on-site energy analyzing as well as quick-wins of energy usage improving measures.

To help picturing carbon emission of supply chain, Yue focused on calculating methods and data collection. Yue quickly analyzed critical carbon emission areas in each stage and designed tables for information gathering from suppliers, with data quality control attached. Moreover, Yue calculated carbon footprint of a piston as a sample to explain the process of analyzing, and shown key emission points. Finally, Yue displayed extent of influences when different emission factor databases are chosen.

Potential Impact

MAHLE can carry out projects in plants with the improved instructions, in order to quickly identify, assess and settle excessive energy usage.  The research outcomes on carbon management in product value chain, including the information collection table and calculating methods of carbon emission, will assist MAHLE to effectively collect task-oriented data from supply chain, to appropriately measure carbon footprint of each product and to formulate tactics in responding critical emission areas.