Producing biogas from waste is a good idea. That’s why waste management companies collect the moist, organic material from the “brown” and “green” rubbish bins and transport it to the mostly municipal biogas plants. In these plants, the material is fermented at relatively high temperatures of ca. 58°C inside a robust fermenter. This process produces compost and biogas. This biogas is now supposed to be upgraded in a biogas upgrading plant in Sinsheim by means of a VORWERK membrane system.
Before the gas reaches the core of the upgrading process - the Evonik gas permeation membranes – it has to be cleaned from all micropollutants so that in the end, only methane and carbon dioxide have to be separated. This task is a hard nut to crack!
Waste gases are usually cleaned from this mix of volatile substances whose smell is reminiscent of the smell of brush cleaner by means of activated carbon. Afterwards, the gas has to be desulfurized. This method generates operating expenses of several hundred thousand Euros each year. Equipped with our experiences from previous construction projects in Uzwil and Frankfurt, we have now entered the home stretch of building a plant which can remove these volatile substances in a different way which is considerably more economic.
The scope of delivery essentially includes a gas tank with a size of 5000 m³ which buffers difference quantities, a pre-purification with activated carbon, a screw-type compressor by means of which the biogas reaches an overpressure of 13 bar, a cleaning and filtering process which binds and separates the volatile substances as well as a membrane which concentrates the biomethane into a form that can be fed into the network.
This whole process is taking place on a sloping ground in Sinsheim on which the construction of the biogas plant is currently taking place. Furthermore, there is an already existing biomass heating plant which is used as a control center.