Siemens and E.ON Kraftwerke are to build a pilot CO2 capture plant at the E.ON power plant Staudinger in Grosskrotzenburg near Hanau. The two companies are thus pushing further ahead with the development of a process geared toward climate-compatible power generation. A lab-proven process is to be employed under real operating conditions at the power plant’s hard-coal-fired Staudinger Unit 5. The pilot is scheduled to start operation in the summer of 2009.
With the post-combustion capture process developed by Siemens CO2 is removed from the power plant’s flue gas using special cleaning agents before the cleaned gases are discharged to atmosphere via the plant’s stack. One of the advantages of this technology is that it can be backfitted to the thermal power plant. Siemens has been developing this technology for several years at the Frankfurt-Hoechst industrial park. This process is characterised among other things by good environmental compatibility, comparatively low energy consumption and only very low loss of the cleaning agent used. In the pilot plant the cleaning agent’s long-term chemical stability and the efficiency of the process will be put to the test under real power plant conditions. In parallel, the technology will be further optimised in terms of energy consumption.
The pilot plant will be operated with part of the flue gas from Unit 5. E.ON Kraftwerke and Siemens intend to run the pilot plant on the site of the Staudinger power plant until the end of 2010.
This project is being sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Economics under the terms of the COORETEC Initiative. It is part of the federal government’s 5th Energy Research Program “Innovation and New Energy Technologies” and promotes research and development in the field of low-CO2 power plant technologies.
