The first plant to use GEA’s expertise around carbon capture is the Phoenix Zementwerke plant in Beckum, Germany and they have discovered that they can trap 90% of CO2 emissions in cement through using carbon capture.
This plant in Germany has shown success and it has led to GEA, who are an international tech group, developing an extensive carbon capture portfolio which focuses on encouraging the decarbonisation of Carbon Intensive Industries. These industries include businesses which produce high emissions from manufacturing products such as cement, glass and chemicals. GEA’s aim with this portfolio is to push the industries to increase the environmental sustainability of their operations.
The Phoenix Zementwerke plant which uses GEA’s technology is a test plant which discovered it is capable of producing 500,000 tons of cement a year and through this emitting 1,000 tons of CO2 every day. The results have also shown that the carbon captured could either be stored or used, which opens up more opportunities and highlights further the pressing need GEA is backing, to focus on carbon capture. The next steps for these results will involve more tests being undertaken and then eventually the plant will be scaled up in order to handle larger emission volumes.
GEA’s portfolio will consist of 4 plant sizes with waste heat generated in the carbon-emitting production process determining the size of the plant. The advantage of these plants is that once adapted the systems can remove emitted carbon with little to zero energy input.
Marcel Gustav Krogbeumker, Managing Director of Phoenix Zementwerke, said, “We view carbon capture as an exceptionally promising technology. Leveraging GEA’s decades-long expertise in exhaust gas treatment, I am highly optimistic that, together, we will engineer and implement a solution capable of capturing at least 90 percent of our emissions.”
Dr. Felix Ortloff, Senior Director GEA Carbon Capture Solutions also commented on this new project, highlighting why it is such an important step for the carbon capture industry, “Every customer has distinct opportunities for carbon utilization. This is why it’s crucial to draw up a comprehensive site plan that explores the options for carbon utilization and the requisite infrastructure. In the long run, this will lead to a new sector of the economy centred around CO2.”
GEA’s new plants emphasise how important capturing carbon is, as not only does it remove carbon from the atmosphere, but it also enables companies to turn their waste carbon into a useful product.