Finland’s technology firm Wartsila said Thursday it won a contract to build a carbon-neutral LNG production facility in Cologne, Germany,
The LNG/bioLNG production plant will have a capacity of 100,000 tons per year. Wartsila said it secured the order in September without reviling the name of the customer.
Worth noting here, Shell said earlier this year it aims to build a small biomethane liquefaction plant in the area. This plant will have the same capacity and would be located at Shell’s Godorf refinery near Cologne.
This plant will supply Shell’s network of LNG stations by trucks. From there, LNG will be distributed for the heavy-duty road transport sector in Germany.
BioLNG is the next obvious step
Wartsila said the contracted plant would liquefy gas from the natural gas grid to produce carbon-neutral LNG.
The use of LNG as an “emissions-reducing fuel in the marine and transportation industries is already well established.”
However, “to introduce bioLNG which can be mixed with LNG is the next obvious step in enabling a CO2-neutral transportation fuel,” Wartsila’s vice president for gas solutions, Antti Kuokkanen, said in the statement.
Warstila explains that the feedstock for bioLNG is based on biological waste material such as liquid manure and food waste, which is fed to an anaerobic digestion reactor that produces biogas.
Following this process, the gas becomes biomethane ending up in the gas grid.
Green gas certificates are issued along with the injected biomethane, which then permits operators at other locations, such as liquefaction plants producing bioLNG, to buy the certificates and utilise the biomethane, the firm said.
The Wärtsilä scope for this project includes the engineering, the civil works, installation, and commissioning of the plant.
Wartsila added it expects the plant to be fully operational by autumn 2022.
