Periodic Reporting for period 2 - IMPOWER2X (INERATEC Modular Plants for Renewable Chemical Products)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-05-01 bis 2023-06-30
To achieve the Paris climate targets, we need to drastically reduce our CO2 emissions as a society. To make this possible, INERATEC (IC) recycles greenhouse gases such as CO2 and uses these together with green hydrogen to produce sustainable fuels, so-called e-fuels, and high-quality chemicals, so-called e-products. The CO2 used for production comes from biogenic sources, such as biogas plants, from unavoidable industrial waste gases or is filtered directly from the ambient air by direct air capture. e-Fuels can be used in particular in aviation, shipping and the chemical industry, as these sectors will continue to rely on the use of hydrocarbons, i.e. fuels and chemicals, in the future. INERATEC's e-Fuels are a CO2-neutral alternative to fossil fuels, thus offering these sectors the opportunity to reduce their emissions and de-fossilise them in the long term. In addition, the fuels offer a solution for long-term storage and transportation of renewable energy. Furthermore, they are already compatible with existing global infrastructure and vehicle fleets due to their drop-in capability.
The EIC-funded project IMPOWER2X is in alignment with INERATEC’s strategy of strengthening its position as market leader for synthetic, renewable fuels. Within the project, INERATEC is scaling-up its technology from demonstration to industrial applications, consequently reducing the costs to provide the technology. To achieve that, the project focuses on modularising and standardising the plant concepts, preparing the serial production of the modules and reactors to be implemented at industrial scale and at customers’ sites.
The project overall objectives are thus aiming at:
1. Optimising and up-scaling the reactor modules and modular plants
2. Preparing the scalable serial production
3. Initiating the business implementation
The EIC-funded project IMPOWER2X is in alignment with INERATEC’s strategy of strengthening its position as market leader for synthetic, renewable fuels. Within the project, INERATEC is scaling-up its technology from demonstration to industrial applications, consequently reducing the costs to provide the technology. To achieve that, the project focuses on modularising and standardising the plant concepts, preparing the serial production of the modules and reactors to be implemented at industrial scale and at customers’ sites.
The project overall objectives are thus aiming at:
1. Optimising and up-scaling the reactor modules and modular plants
2. Preparing the scalable serial production
3. Initiating the business implementation
After a detailed state of the art analysis of the engineering documents, new plant structure for multi Mega Watt (MW) modules has been designed based on first electric design and main equipment. First approaches to increase the reactor capacity have been developed following a strategy of numbering-up vs. scaling-up to design 5 MW & 20 MW units. The concept of numbering-up is to multiply the reaction structures per reaction, the number of reactors per module and the number of modules per plant. This way, a road to 100 MW unit has been initiated. To enable the automation processes in the company, IC started the implementation of an ERP system, set-up a dedicated make or buy process, but also a quality assurance framework with a dedicated process map and process portfolio of the company; thus setting-up the management, operational and supporting processes necessary to allow the certification (ISO 9001) of the company. Relying on the work performed by the engineering of the modules and plants, IC finally build and assembled the first industrial prototypes of the Reverse-Water-Gas-Shift (RWGS) and Fischer-Tropsch (FT) reactors and a series of tests to validate the industrial stage have been performed.; thus, validating the design for the bigger reactors to be integrated into the exploitation for real environment demonstration in Frankfurt Höchst that will be inaugurated in Q3 2023. Furthermore, the concept for the serial production of the reactors and plant modules for a world-scale plant (100 MW) has been developed allowing a first extension of the manufacturing hall, integration of production stations, and new production process as e.g. external stamping instead of milling. The serial production should be officially launched in 2025. While further developing its technology, IC works actively on building its business opportunities by initiating cooperation with dedicated partners and customers, but also qualifying deals for plants realisation and fuel off-takes. In this framework, IC updated its business models and sales processes to guaranty the successful realisation and expansion of IC PtX plants. Since the topic of synthetic fuels is still unknown and controversial in Europe, it is crucial to support a dynamic dissemination campaign to increase the awareness for CO2 neutral fuels. Therefore, IC is using any opportunities through social media, press, TV, political events, etc. to increase its visibility and show the potential of e-fuels for the different transport (e.g. aviation, shipping) and industrial sectors (e.g. chemical industry). A big effort was also put on establishing the exploitation strategy towards the demonstration site of Frankfurt-Höchst: a validated design for a 10 MW plant has been finalized and constitutes the basis for the plant module of Frankfurt-Höchst, which will reach a 2.500 t/a production capacity of e-fuels. In alignment with IC's globalization business strategy, a design for world-scale plants of 35.000 t/a production capacity (100 MW electrolysis capacity) has been developed relying on the numbering approach for up-scaling the technology. Also, preparing and submitting the BImSchG application, which is mandatory in Germany if building a chemical plant, was a big milestone achieved. A further big step was the REACH registration of the e-fuels produced in Frankfurt-Höchst, such as FT-Oil/Diesel and FT-Wax.
The success and the impact of the IMPOWER2X project can be assessed with different indicators demonstrating the economic and ecological impact. For the company growth, the project allowed increasing the personal resources from 47 to 130 FTE employees. And the personal growth is planned to further increase considering the business development initiated within the project. A total of 200 employees by 2025 is being forecasted. For IC's customers, CO2 reduction in tons and CO2 avoiding costs are the major impact indicators. For IC, CO2 emission reduction means a significant business opportunity because CO2 can be stored and costs can be saved for customers, depending on the CO2 emission price or the taxation in each country. When e-fuels sales take off, the respective e-fuel price plays an important role. Today's price of e-fuels like diesel, kerosene or gasoline is determined by the price of crude oil, plus a premium of 20%, which is the long-term average price difference between the end-products and crude oil. The largest share of the manufacturing costs for all PtX products considered is accounted by the levelised cost of electricity (approx. 40 % to 52 %). CO2 is also a very important cost factor by the production of PtX: If the CO2 is extracted from the air ("Direct Air Capture" method), this results in 25% of the total manufacturing and transport costs of PtX products. If, on the other hand, the CO2 is obtained in concentrated form, for example from biogas plants or from industrial exhaust air, CO2 costs are reduced by about 80 % and thus account for only 6-8 % of the total production and transport costs of PtX derivatives. A further influence on the manufacturing costs of PtX products is the size of production facilities. For larger plants, economies of scale can be tackled and the specific cost of the products (per unit of the Final product) are thus lower; the average funding requirement per uni of most products in the larger plant is about 8-34% lower than the smaller plant (comparison 100 MW & 250 MW plants). This is the reason why the IMPOWER2X is being so crucial for the company business development allowing the rapid implementation and market ramp-up of a PtX industry in Europe.