Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 18th April 2024 Issue no. 1110
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New ETW SmartCycle biomethane plant in operation in France
Last month, ETW Energietechnik installed its first biogas processing plant in Scherwiller, France, and the facility has been in continuous operation ever since.
This compact model of the biogas treatment system ETW SmartCycle PSA, cann process 230 to 385 standard cubic metres of biogas per hour. Plant manufacturer Rytec is responsible for the entire project development and the installed fermentation line.
"France is currently one of the most important markets for biomethane plants in Europe," explains Marco Weiss, managing director of ETW Energietechnik GmbH. "Biomethane is currently gaining ground in the country. Energy experts assume that by 2030 France will be able to cover one third of its gas requirements with biomethane. An essential prerequisite for the implementation, however, is the application of efficient and practice-proven processing technologies.
"In the recent past, we had a strong demand for compact plants in the performance class up to about 500 standard cubic meters of biogas per hour. Together with our French partner Gaseo, we have integrated our ETW SmartCycle technology - already proven on larger systems - into a compact, flexible and energy-efficient container concept.
"In addition, this technology will enable us to establish ourselves in many other markets with similar development potential."
The flexible operation of the plant allows the operator to adapt directly to the biogas production without having to accept losses in biomethane quality. The 'smart' process control reacts fully automatically even to large volume flow fluctuations and changing raw gas qualities. This means that there is no loss in yield or quality of the biomethane produced.
The self-regenerating, dry gas treatment process has been continuously established in the industrial gas sector since the 1980s due to its extremely high availability.
Dr. Oliver Jende, sales manager for Biomethane Plants at ETW, says:
"This is where biogas quality is less predictable because large amounts of residues and waste end up in biogas plants. While in other systems an increased risk of efficiency losses and plant downtimes can be expected due to the presence of contaminants in the biogas, we can handle these conditions on the basis of our ETW SmartCycle PSA technology.
"A high-quality industry standard paired with the special process advantages of the
ETW SmartCycle PSA process, such as the lowest energy consumption of all treatment
processes, result in the lowest life cycle costs of all biogas upgrading processes
available on the market.
"With more than 150,000 operating hours, our PPE processing systems have a total availability of over 99%."
ETW Energietechnik and Gaseo are currently building the second plant for the French market at Arcis-sur-Aube in the north-eastern French department of Aube. Here, the treatment capacity will be 870 standard cubic metres of biogas per hour from a waste fermentation plant. The biomethane plant will be installed before the end of this year.
24th May 2018