Biogas plant to provide sustainable production at Chemelot

OCI Nitrogen has teamed up with Re-N Technology to develop a large-scale biogas plant on the Chemelot industrial site. Going by the name of Zitta®Biogas Chemelot, the plant is set to make a major contribution to solving the problem of surplus manure in the Netherlands. At the same time, it will make OCI Nitrogen's production process more sustainable. This is completely in line with the objectives set by the Dutch government for greenhouse gas emissions in the new coalition agreement.

Complete recycling

The plant will process manure, converting it into biogas, dried manure pellets and pure water.
Pig manure is processed as fresh as possible to minimise the pollution caused by methane and ammonia emissions released into the environment around farms. The biogas is used in OCI Nitrogen's fertiliser production. Residues are processed into organic manure pellets. In this way, all the nutrients are made available to agriculture in concentrated form. For example, 4.5 million kg of phosphate is exported in the form of dry fertiliser to countries that need phosphate. About 2 million kg of nitrogen is also captured and converted into concentrated liquid fertiliser.
The biogas plant will process about 700 ktonnes of manure, which can produce 40 million cubic metres of biogas. This is equal to the natural gas consumption of 25,000 households and helps OCI Nitrogen to reduce its carbon footprint. The plant's efficiency is significantly higher than that of conventional biogas plants because it uses the waste heat produced at Chemelot.

Environmental permit

The initiative is entirely consistent with the new area strategy, Chemelot 2025, in which Chemelot aims to become the most competitive and sustainable chemicals production site in western Europe. The Province of Limburg has now issued the environmental permit. This was preceded by meetings with representatives of local residents to discuss the proposed project.
The feasibility of the plant depends, among other things, on the "SDE+" sustainable energy incentive scheme operated by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO). The biogas plant is scheduled to become operational by 2020.