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The reactor, which weighs almost ten tons, is lifted into place by crane. © Caphenia
Pilot plant to revolutionize synthetic fuels market
Frankfurt – A reactor weighing almost ten tons was lifted by crane into the shell of a plant in the Höchst industrial park yesterday. The reactor, which was built by MAN in Deggendorf and arrived in Höchst overnight by heavy-duty transporter, is expected to be used to run a pilot plant for the production of synthetic fuel by the first quarter of 2025 at the latest. Reactor? You immediately think of nuclear energy. “A reaction takes place in the reactor, it is nothing other than a cooking pot,” says Dr. Tarek Husein, the plant’s operations manager. It is not classified as an accident-prone operation and is not dangerous. The plant – now building D 245 not far from the West Gate – is actually comparable to a cooking pot, because it is intended to “cook” synthetic fuel from biomethane and hydrogen at high heat, around 1500 degrees – using a patented process from the company Caphenia from Bernau am Chiemsee. Caphenia is the contraction of the poetic “Carbon Phoenix Arising from the Ashes”, which means “rebirth of the carbon phoenix from the ashes”. Because that’s what it’s all about: generating new energy from combustion residues.
The process, which was developed in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), among others, enables a particularly energy-efficient conversion of electricity, biomethane and CO2 into synthesis gas, which is then transformed into various fuels, including kerosene. The pilot plant in the Höchst industrial park is called “Germany I”. Caphenia Managing Director Dr. Mark Misselhorn speaks of a “global flagship project” – if the technology proves itself in practice, identical plants can be built anywhere in the world – provided the raw materials are available. Instead of biomethane, it could also be “banana plants or chicken manure,” says Misselhorn. The gas is created during the decomposition process of organic material in the absence of oxygen. Or as Dr. Tarek Husein says: “We turn exhaust gases into fuel again.”
The reactor – in the test version four meters high and two meters wide – can produce 600,000 liters of synthetic fuel per year. This amount is to be increased to 18 million liters in the next step. However, this requires new investments. Misselhorn hopes that these will flow if the test reactor proves successful. It cost almost 20 million euros to be implemented. The Federal Ministry of Economics contributed almost 7 million, the state of Hesse around 1.1 million. The rest comes from private investors, and among them are actually several former airline managers. Because: airplanes, that much seems clear, will probably never be able to fly with batteries; the batteries required would be so heavy with the current state of technology that the plane would no longer be able to carry a single passenger.
There is still a long way to go: 18 million liters are almost 15 thousand tons of fuel; at Frankfurt Airport alone, four to five million tons of kerosene are consumed annually. But the new technology is considered to be particularly effective: Plasma Boudouard technology (PBR) is not only convincing because it does not use fossil fuels, but also because it is much more efficient, estimated at 86-90 percent compared to 45-50 percent for fossil fuels. “It is the most efficient process in the world,” says Misselhorn. The substances are broken down to the atomic level in the high-temperature plasma and reassembled; all impurities – such as sulfur or nitrogen – can be removed. This means that they are not emitted when the fuel is burned.
Almost 15 years of planning and research “through all the ups and downs,” says Misselhorn, preceded this. Founded in 2012 under the name CCP Technology, the company Caphenia has developed its own processes and recombined already known processes – and holds worldwide patents for this so-called power and biogas to liquid (PBtL) process. Misselhorn says: “As of today, we are on the home stretch of our vision of renewable fuels for climate-neutral mobility.”
In contrast to so-called eFuels (electrofuels, i.e. synthetic fuels generated with electricity), Misselhorn speaks of “reFuels”, i.e. recycled fuels. When choosing the location for the pilot plant, Caphenia officials examined industrial sites throughout Germany and Europe. The decisive factors were the proximity to the airport and the availability of all the necessary media such as biogas or hydrogen, says the managing director: “No industrial park in Germany, or indeed in all of Europe, has better connections than the Höchst industrial park.” In the future, the biomethane will come from the biogas plant of the site operator Infraserv; now, in the test phase, it still comes from delivered bottles.
Holger Vonhof
