The successful work from the “ORBIT” project on storing electricity from renewable sources in the form of methane continues.
Under the leadership of the Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule Regensburg (OTH Regensburg), ten partners are working within the framework of “ORBIT II” on the further development and industrial use of a power-to-gas plant and thus on the future of the hydrogen economy in Germany.
In the joint project “Expansion of a highly efficient trickle bed bioreactor and optimization of the methanation plant for commercial industrial use”, ten partners are working on the expansion of a power-to-gas plant so that the technology becomes economically viable.
As in the first “ORBIT” project, archaea perform the central task of methanation, converting carbon dioxide and hydrogen into methane and water. Archaea are microorganisms and are among the oldest living organisms on earth. The bioreactor set up in the previous project will be expanded in “ORBIT II” to include an electrolyzer, among other things, and converted into a scalable container solution. Through the two-year trial operation with various industrial gases and the field test in a sewage treatment plant, the partners will gain new knowledge for the economic operation in the industrial environment of the plant. Trials in the microbiology laboratory and an adaptation of the reactor will be used to develop suitable plant configurations for various industrial applications, allowing customized solutions to be developed.
Project partners are the University of Regensburg with its Chair of Microbiology and the Archaea Center located there, the Chair of Energy Process Engineering at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the industrial companies Ostermeier H2ydrogen Solutions GmbH (Schweitenkirchen) and Schott AG with its Landshut site.
In addition, the companies Electrochaea GmbH, MicrobEnergy GmbH (Hitachi Zosen INOVA) and MicroPyros BioEnerTec GmbH participate in the project as associated partners and contribute their know-how in the field of biological methanation. Other associated partners are the municipal utility Stadtwerke Pfaffenhofen a. d. Ilm and the Bürgerenergiegenossenschaft im Landkreis Pfaffenhofen a. d. Ilm eG. The two Pfaffenhofen partners provide support for the integration of renewable electricity into the power-to-gas plant, its operation in a sewage treatment plant and citizen participation.
