Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ADD-ON (A demonstration plant of enhanced biogas production with Add-On technology)
Reporting period: 2016-02-01 to 2020-06-30
With Ductor’s technology, biogas producers can replace maize silage with chicken manure as biogas feedstock, for example. With this approach alone, European biogas producers could achieve a combined €1 billion improvement in their profitability while simultaneously cutting CO2 emissions by 1.5 million tons and releasing more than 811,000 hectares of cultivated land for socially and environmentally sustainable use, such as food production.
This project focuses on scaling up the current pilot equipment into industrial scale (over 1000 m3 of biogas production reactor), optimization of the process, and convincing reference customers to enable broader market penetration.
The project achieved the goal to build and add a Ductor reactor at industrial size biogas plant with 99% completion. The lacking percentage include only electrical and automation finishing. The plant is scheduled to start in November 2020 in Haren, Germany.
The permitting process caused unforeseen schedule problems which severely hindered the execution of the project.
However, the ADD-ON project helped Ductor the built a biogas gas plant in Mexico with ADD-ON technology, The plant opening day was in September 2019. Furthemore, Ductor Oy have benefited from the project and dissemination of the project in closing three (3) deals of biogas plants in Poland and very good progress in Norway and US.
With Ductor’s Finnish bench scale pilot plant we were able to demonstrate that long term, over six months, operation of a biogas plant using only de-ammonified (i.e. removing organic ammonia by the Ductor process) chicken litter is possible. And there is very little biogas potential lost when the gases formed in the Ductor fermentation are fed into the biogas reactor.
In laboratory scale the potential of feathers as a feedstock for biogas was demonstrated (Deliverable 3.1). The feathers yielded high biogas potential, but were not taken into the Finnish pilot in order not to disturb the long operation with chicken litter.
We have also conducted market research to i) verify the market potential within the German biogas market, our 1st phase target market and ii) identify other interesting markets for our technology, both in Europe and other regions such as the US.