25-05-2022

INERATEC’s and Clariant’s partnership to support the scale-up of sustainable fuel production

Clariant continues to join forces with Ineratec in the challenge for a greener future. Since 2017, Clariant’s tailor-made catalysts have supported Ineratec’s power-to-liquid technology for producing sustainable fuels from lab-scale to industrial pilot-scale. Now it will be used in the company’s first globally pioneering pilot plant in Frankfurt Höchst. This new pioneer plant has up to 10 times higher production capacity and the several thousand tons per year will be a main driver for the broad availability of sustainable, CO2-neutral fuels and chemicals. “The collaboration with Clariant during our scale-up phase was one crucial part for the successful deployment at industrial scale”, CEO Tim Boeltken states.

Marvin Estenfelder, Head of R&D at Clariant Catalysts, commented, “we are very pleased to collaborate with such an innovative company as Ineratec to jointly tackle the challenge of fighting climate change. The successful scale-up is a major step towards accelerating pioneering work in sustainable fuel production to gradually drive the decarbonization of the transport sector.”

The collaboration focuses on the first reaction step within the power-to-liquid process, the reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) reaction to produce syngas from CO2 and renewable hydrogen. Due to the cutting-edge reactor technology Ineratec has developed for this step, the catalyst must provide specific characteristics to be applicable within the micro-structured system. The tailored catalyst from Clariant allows reaching the optimal desired syngas composition for the subsequent synthesis reactions.

In two industrial pilot plants, located in Germany, Clariant´s ShiftMax 100 RE reverse water-gas shift catalysts have already been used and proven to meet the expected syngas yield and composition.

For Ineratec’s new larger pioneering plant, the technology will again rely on Clariant’s ShiftMax® 100 RE catalyst to produce renewable syngas via reverse water-gas shift — an essential step in the conversion of CO2. The promoted nickel catalyst shows an unprecedented high resistance against coking and low methane by-product formation. Furthermore, ShiftMax 100 RE offers high CO2 conversion over a long lifetime, high poison resistance, and superior strength.