Environmental Benefits of Proper Sealing in Gas and Steam Turbines

Higher-quality seal systems use less fuel and help protect the environment. Reduced leakage and improved efficiency allow gas and steam turbines to provide similar power to the user base, but with a lower environmental footprint. While an engineer or operations manager aspires to achieve zero leakage, sustainability practitioners and compliance teams can employ sealing as a tangible lever to help their sustainability and compliance efforts around emissions, safety, and reporting.

How Turbine Leaks Harm the Environment

If a turbine leaks, it will need to work harder to produce the same output. In a gas turbine (https://www.britannica.com/technology/gas-turbine-engine), bypass air and hot gas leakage to atmosphere can reduce firing efficiency, which increases fuel burn and CO₂ production per megawatt-hour. In steam turbines, uncontrolled steam losses are losing treated water, treated chemicals, potential visible plume venting, and demand increase to auxiliary systems.

Additionally, oil-seal leaking could be generating mist and additional waste streams (housekeeping waste) as well, leading to higher Scope 1 emissions and multiple more interventions, adding more risk and cost.

Sealing Solutions That Reduce Emissions

Modern sealing has shifted its focus from improved packing performance (reduced friction and wear) to keeping working fluids in the appropriate location during normal operations. The seal performance enhancements relate to improved designs that target the highest leakage paths and utilize materials and geometries that minimize effective clearance under load. After component clearance improvements and targeted seal clearance renewal, plants will often observe a heat rate improvements because less energy leaks past the flow path.

Brush seals take into account rotor movement, with significant radial leakage improvement over standard designs that can also accommodate transient rubs.
Optimized labyrinth seals with abradable coatings provide reduced clearances in a safe way to reduce recirculation while improving steam path efficiency.
Programmatic leakage control for fittings around shaft ends, valves, and casing joints reduces fugitive losses, which don’t show up in stack impact measurements, but do boost fuel bills.
Upgrades to seals can be bundled into planned retrofit services during planned outages with all alignments and casing restoration, locking in all efficiency benefits across the unit.

Improving Safety with Better Sealing

Tight seals improve safety by reducing high-temperature surfaces, hot-steam blowoffs, and noise by reducing the use of seal oil. Reduced leakage avoids a buildup of explosive oil mist and/or gas pockets and minimizes the fire risk, while lowering trip chances. The crews benefit too: every lost band-aid fix means the crew avoids exposure time near rotating equipment, while safer, cleaner decks mean safer, faster routine rounds with little to no housekeeping required.

All in all, better sealing provides a dent in supporting or maintaining a culture of prevention, as much as performance.

Compliance With Environmental Standards

Sealing upgrades provide a straightforward way to support permit and ESG objectives. Fuel consumption is lower for the same produced capacity, reducing CO₂ intensity ratios (or whatever notional standardized gCO₂ emissions basis local caps are using), as well as ticking boxes for uncontrolled steam and air release as they pertain to LDAR-type programs and environmental housekeeping type metrics. Click here to learn more about Leak Detection and Repair.

While sealing enhancements will show changes in clearance, leak rates, or efficiency deltas, these benefits will translate into measurable and auditable evidence to be used in both compliance and sustainability disclosures.

Furthermore, when coupled with condition monitoring and documented maintenance, sealing improvements positively contribute to ISO 14001-type management systems, while not adding any additional management complexity.

Future of Eco-Friendly Sealing Technology

The next generation sealing design efforts are considering not only performance but sustainability as well. To that end, experienced engineers are looking for lighter overall footprints from cradle to grave: decreased replacement cycles, reduced machining processes, and better inspection techniques. Digital tools will make it possible to predict leak growth, so that teams only have to fix the problem once, and only once—per the planned outage.

Additively manufactured seal segments that will optimize flow paths, while reducing the amount of material used and scrap waste.
New low-friction, long-lasting seals that can maintain tight clearances without erosional wear and frequent rework, to reduce overall material waste and lost production time.
Data-driven inspection to use analytics and IoT-based sensors to infer when to inspect in order to predict leak trends, enabling crews to only do the work that needs to be done.
Restore-able designs that enable parts reuse and reduce carbon footprint impacts of spare parts and other logistics.

When sealing is seen as a sustainability project, not simply another reliability project, then gas and steam turbine operators can take advantage of fuel savings as well as emissions reduction and compliance burden reductions. The co-benefit is built-in resilience: safer crews, more stable and predictable outputs, and cleaner audits, all made possible by smarter, tighter seals.