Chemical Engineering October 2021 - 8

ture and in taste to its animal counterpart with
vastly reduced environmental impact and no
mass farming or slaughter.
RECYCLED PLASTICS
Recycled plastics often contain impurities
and polymer contaminants that accelerate
polymer degradation, which change the material
properties. Consequently, recyclers and
plastic converters are facing quality and performance
issues while processing recycled
polymeric material. To address these issues,
BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.
basf.com) launched, last month, IrgaCycle, a
new range of additives to improve the properties
of mechanically recycled plastics.
ELECTROLYZER PRODUCTION
Last month, Enapter (Pisa, Italy; www.enapter.com)
broke ground on a new facility in
Saerbeck, Germany for mass production of
electrolyzers. The 82,000-m2 production facility
will boost the company's production capacity
to 10,000 electrolyzers per month. The
automated mass-production of electrolyzers
will enable Enapter to decrease the cost of the
devices and thus quickly make green H2 competitive
with fossil fuels, says the company.
Development of the machinery necessary for
mass production has been supported by the
North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Economic
Affairs, Innovation, Digitalization and Energy
with around €9.36 million.
Based on a patented anion-exchange membrane
(AEM)
technology,
the
company's
Electrolyser 2.1 has a production capacity of
50 NL/h of H2 with 99.9% purity (99.999%
with optional dryer). Up to 70 units can be
stacked in a 20-ft container for higher production
rates. The new production campus
will begin incrementally, starting 4Q 2022,
with first customer deliveries anticipated in
early 2023. From 2022, Enapter will offer the
first megawatt-scale AEM Electrolyzer - the
containerized AEM Multicore - featuring 420
of its AEM electrolysis stacks.
REDUCING CO2 EMISSIONS
A new four-year research project, dubbed
CircFuel, aims to develop technology that will
pyrolyze waste into synthetic fuel at cement
plants, thereby reducing CO2 emissions. The
project is coordinated by DTU Chemical Engineering
(Lyngby, Denmark; www.kt.dtu.dk),
with partners DTU Management, FLSmidth
A/S, Dampskibsselskabet Norden, MAN Energy
Solutions SE, Haldor Topsøe A/S, Geminor,
and Finnsementti Oy, and a total budget
of DKK28.7 million (around $4.5 million).
The technology being pursued is a further
development of FLSmidth's patented wastetreatment
reactor, which already can ensure
the use of a high fraction of waste as fuel in
cement plants, and which can thereby reduce
dependence on fossil fuels. In the project, a
further development of FLSmidth's reactor will
(Continues on p. 10)
8
Operation begins at the world's largest
direct air capture, CO2-storage plant
L
ast month, Climeworks (Zurich,
Switzerland; www.
climeworks.com) started operations
of Orca, said to be
the world's first and largest climatepositive
direct air capture (DAC) and
storage plant. Located in Hellisheiði,
Iceland, the Orca plant has a capturing
capacity of 4,000 ton/yr of
carbon dioxide, which will be permanently
stored using a natural
mineralization process developed
by Carbfix Iceland ohf. (Reykjavík;
www.carbfix.com).
The construction of Orca started in
May 2020 and is based on advanced
modular technology in the form of
stackable, container-sized collector
units. This has made it possible for
Orca to be operational in under 15
months. Compared to the previous
technology generation, the use of
steel in the collector units has been reduced
by roughly half per output unit.
Orca also supports the expansion of
Climeworks, as the technology can
easily be replicated at different locations
worldwide and on ever-larger
scales, in a flexible manner wherever
ample renewable energy and
storage conditions are available, the
company says. Strategically located
adjacent to ON Power's Hellisheiði
Geothermal Power Plant, Orca runs
fully on renewable energy.
Carbfix mixes the air-captured
CO2 with water and pumps it deep
underground. Because the carbonated
water is acidic, it reacts with
rock formations to release available
cations, such as calcium, magnesium
and iron. Over time, these elements
combine with the dissolved
CO2 and form carbonates that fill up
the pores within the rocks. The carbonates
are stable for thousands of
years and can thus be considered
permanently stored. In the CarbFix
pilot project that began in 2012, it
was determined that at least 95% of
the injected CO2 mineralizes within
two years, much faster than previously
thought. To date, over 70,000
tons of CO2 from industrial sources
have been successfully stored at the
Carbfix injection site in Hellisheiði.
Integration of CO2 direct air capture and
alcohol-to-jet fuels manufacturing
A
feasibility study is underway
for the world's first commercial
facility that integrates direct
air capture (DAC) of atmospheric
carbon dioxide with gas
fermentation of CO2 and production
of aviation fuels. LanzaTech (Chicago,
Ill.; www.lanzatech.com) and Carbon
Engineering (Squamish, B.C.; www.
carbonengineering.com) have partnered
on this first-of-its-kind facility to
produce sustainable aviation fuel from
atmospheric CO2.
The project, known as AtmosFUEL,
seeks to integrate three technologies
that have each been proven
separately: Carbon Engineering's
large-scale DAC system for extracting
atmospheric CO2; LanzaTech's
gas-fermentation technology for
converting CO2 to ethanol; and the
LanzaJet Alcohol-to-Jet process
- a method for converting ethanol
to jet fuel that was developed by
LanzaTech and the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory (Richland,
Wash.; www.pnnl.gov). The project
team includes British Airways (Hamonsdsworth,
U.K.) and Virgin Atlantic
Airlines (Crawley, U.K.).
" The study is looking at how best
to couple the technologies so that
we can take advantage of byproducts
and energy from one part of the
process and use them in others, " explains
Amy Ruddock, vice president,
Europe at Carbon Engineering.
Carbon Engineering is currently
engineering multiple megatonscale
DAC facilities. The company
uses existing industrial equipment
and processes in its DAC system;
for example, its air contactors are
based on industrial cooling towers.
" Aviation is going to be one of the
most difficult industries to decarbonize,
and sustainable fuel solutions are
poised to play a key role in supporting
the industry's energy transition, " Ruddock
remarks.
Results of the feasibility study are
expected in March 2022.
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
OCTOBER 2021
http://www.climeworks.com http://www.basf.com http://www.carbfix.com http://www.en http://www.apter.com http://www.pnnl.gov http://www.lanzatech.com http://www.carbonengineering.com http://www.kt.dtu.dk http://WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
Chemical Engineering October 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering October 2021
