Request an Assessment

Is my plant eligible for this no-cost service?

The plant must be a manufacturing facility within 150 miles of College Station with an SIC code between 20 and 39 (oil and gas production, farming and ranching unfortunately are not considered in this category).

You must be willing to supply certain data about energy use (copies of electric and natural gas bills for 12 months), number of employees, annual production, gross annual sales, and other items.

A plant must be eligible on a plant-by-plant basis. A plant owned by a large company owning many plants is eligible if the individual plant meets the established criteria. In order qualify, three of the following 4 criteria must be met:

• Gross annual sales below $100 million.
• Fewer than 500 employees at the plant site.
• Annual utility bills of more than $100,000 and less than $2.5 million.
• No in-house professional staff to perform the assessment.

What can I expect from Texas A&M University?

You can expect to receive a formal, technical report written in terms of projects that are recommended for implementation about two months after the team of staff and students visits your plant. Every project will recommend an action such as "Install power factor correction" or "Insulate bare steam pipes" and display calculations of cost savings, as well as calculations of energy or waste reductions and productivity savings. Every project will provide conceptual information or designs to achieve the savings, as well as an estimated implementation cost and pay back information. You and others on your staff should be able to understand the calculations in the report.

Before the assessment team visits your plant, you will be asked to provide 12 months of copies of all major energy bills, usually electricity and natural gas. Center personnel will review your data and call several weeks ahead of time to schedule an assessment visit at your plant by a team of students led by the Director or Assistant Director.

Assessment visits typically require one day and begin about 8:15 a.m. at your facility with a discussion of your production processes and a review of the data you sent. The initial discussion is a time of intense conferring about your production and related procedures, and usually takes about an hour and a half. Subsequently, plant personnel lead the assessment team on a tour of the facility so that the team members may observe the production process. The assessment team pays particular attention to production activities, energy-using systems, and areas where waste is generated and stored. After that, the students are assigned cost reduction projects to research. In the afternoon, the students gather data to support cost savings calculations by observing operations, making measurements, and asking questions. About 3:00 p.m. the team finishes with a 15 minute exit interview with plant management and returns to Texas A&M University to prepare a formal technical report for you, which will be reviewed thoroughly by the staff leader of the assessment team. You will receive the report about two months after the assessment visit and a follow-up phone call 6-9 months following the visit. Traditionally around 60% of recommendations are implemented in visited facilities.

Scheduling an Assessment

The US Department of Energy financially supports the IAC program, and consequently there is no cost to the manufacturing plant for these industrial assessments. To schedule an assessment, please contact either Bryan Rasmussen or Jim Eggebrecht. They will review your plant's eligibility and schedule an assessment visit.

SIC Code	Description
20xx	Food and kindred products
21xx	Tobacco products
22xx	Textile mill products
23xx	Apparel and other textile products
24xx	Lumber and wood products
25xx	Furniture and fixtures
26xx	Paper and allied products
27xx	Printing and publishing
28xx	Chemicals and allied products
29xx	Petroleum and coal products
30xx	Rubber and misc. plastics products
31xx	Leather and leather products
32xx	Stone, clay, and glass products
33xx	Primary metal industries
34xx	Fabricated metal products
35xx	Industrial machinery and equipment
36xx	Electronic & other electric equipment
37xx	Transportation equipment
38xx	Instruments and related products
39xx	Miscellaneous manufacturing industries