Chemicals are vital to daily life, but their production has made the industry a big emitter of greenhouse gases. Since it was founded in , the Marl Chemical Park, home to around production plants, has been using coal to generate steam and electricity on-site for operations. But the era of coal will soon be history. Thanks to the new plants, up to 1 million tons of carbon dioxide CO 2 emissions will be saved annually, equal to taking , cars off the road or planting 46 million large trees.
Evonik and Siemens Energy have already partnered together at Marl on a project to convert CO2 and water into specialty chemicals using electricity from renewable sources and bacteria β a project that will also include the production of green hydrogen.
With Covid restrictions still in place, this revolution, for Thomas Hagen, Project Manager at Siemens Energy, is currently being televised. From his home office in Erlangen, Hagen needs only open his laptop to have a look at the progress of the huge construction site at Marl Chemical Park and get a glimpse into the future. As project manager, Hagen is pulling all the strings of this special construction project together. On this particular morning, the gas and steam turbines have already been assembled, the boilers are in place, two smokestacks rise 56 meters into the air, and you can see pipes and lines everywhere.
The instrumentation and controls system will also be installed and supplied by Siemens Energy from a site in Essen, less than 30 kilometers from Marl. The power plants, to be completed by , will have special heat recovery steam generators and catalysts that allow them to operate not only on natural gas, but also on regasified liquefied natural gas LNG or various other gases, such as the very residual gases from production processes.
This raises their fuel efficiency to over 90 percent. In addition, the plants will not only generate electricity, but also ensure the supply of up to tons of process steam per hour and power plant unit.
