In Romania, Clariant officially started construction of the first large-scale commercial sunliquid plant for the production of cellulosic ethanol made from agricultural residues.<\/p>\n
The Clariant first commercial now under construction, in a rendering
\nThe project represents the biggest industrial commitment by an international corporation in this region. At full capacity, the plant will produce 50\u00a0000 tons of cellulosic ethanol annually \u2014 using around 250\u00a0000 tons of wheat straw (and other grain residues) sourced from local farmers to. By-products from the process will be used for the generation of renewable energy with the goal of making the plant independent from fossil energy sources. The resulting cellulosic ethanol is therefore an advanced biofuel that is practically carbon-neutral.<\/p>\n
The future Clariant commercial-scale plant, in planning
\n\u201cYou might find yourself asking of me, \u201cwhat are I doing here\u2019\u201d the Romanian minister for energy (who goes by the unlikely name of Anton Anton), asked a group of stakeholders gathered in southwestern Romania this week. \u201cI\u2019m not speaking here about the usual energy type of project \u2014 instead about products and investment we usually associate with agriculture.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true, it\u2019s been a rare sight in Romanian and elsewhere if a dignitary \u2014 or anyone else for that matter \u2014 finds themselves at a groundbreaking for an advanced project aimed at decarbonizing European road transport: they\u2019ve been few and far between.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s turned out to be a lot easier to launch the zillionth wind or solar installation, or energy efficiency project \u2014 and those have been evident in abundance, here in Romania and elsewhere in the EU these past years. Romania has done well in all those, and so have many countries.<\/p>\n
But now the hard yards of decarbonizing Europe begin. The hazy lazy days of substituting natural gas for coal \u2014 or launching a sure-thing wind farm \u2014 to knock down some impressive emissions reductions numbers \u2014 most of those days are done.<\/p>\n
Groundbreaking ceremony for the new sunliquid plant in Craiova\/Romania (from left to right): Urs Herren, Ambassador of Swiss Confederation, Claudiu Mares, State Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Anton Anton, Minister of Energy, Paula P\u00eerv\u0103nescu, State Secretary at the Ministry of Business Environment, Commerce and Entrepreneurship, Christian Kohlpaintner, Member of the Executive Committee Clariant, Ion Prioteasa, Dolj County Council President, Philippe Mengal, Executive Director BBI JU, Constantin Gheorghita, Mayor of Podari, Oliver Kinkel, Head of Region Europe Clariant, Dragos Gavriluta, Clariant Project Director sunliquid Romania, Markus Rarbach, Head of Business Line Biofuels & Derivatives, Clariant, Martin Vollmer, Chief Technology Officer Clariant (Photo: Clariant)
\n\u201dRomania has a EU target to fulfill and observe,\u201d said Anton, \u201cand we have fulfilled our commitments before others. But now, now we wish to fulfill our commitment with transportation, and in this sector [Europeans] are not doing well. Why? why \u2013 we were missing the absolutely innovative, disruptive projects. The ones that represented the exceptional idea that not everyone thought of. This plant is not a classical one, it is out of the ordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s another reason I am glad to be here,\u201d Anton continued. \u201cSome of you know that previously I was the Minister for Research and I always wanted and supported the entire cycle. Not just the idea, and the development of that idea in the research phase. But then a project is developed and a plant is built, and that is the achievement.\u00a0 We are the end of such a cycle where a plant is being built and I am glad to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Romania on the rise
\nIt\u2019s been a rough journey, too, for Romania \u2014 the years since the fall of Communism, the Communist years, the war, the years after independence from the Ottomans. Really, you can go back a thousand years and not find three decades of roaring prosperity strung together in this long-ago outpost of the Roman Empire which, against the odds, preserved a Romance language and a cultural outpost of the West, in the East. These are proud, if frontier, Romans, you can see the lineage etched in their faces and hear it in their speech \u2013 and they provided so much raw material for so long to so many in Europe \u2014 food, petroleum, forest products \u2014 and have so little to show for it. You cheer a little at the thought that the Romanian hour might finally be at hand.<\/p>\n
Ruins of previous industrial developments in the Podari region
\nQuite a number of companies have \u2018broken their pick\u2019 trying out conventional projects in this part of the world \u2014 we\u2019re near the regional center of Craiova in the southwest of the country.\u00a0 It\u2019s a part of the world where you\u2019ll still see horse-and-cart technology in everyday use; you see the land and you realize the immensity of opportunity here, but advanced European technology hasn\u2019t always easily found itself a place here. If the United States has its \u201cflyover states\u201d, Europe has a wide swatch of \u201cskipover regions\u201d where advanced technology could be achieving the same massive financial lift as elsewhere \u2014 but the train, as they say, just has never reached the station because the tracks have rarely led here.<\/p>\n
Ruins of previous industrial developments in the Podari region
\nThe lift opportunity is immense \u2014 leave aside the jobs that come with advanced projects and the decarbonization opportunity that comes with replacing gasoline with advanced low carbon fuels like cellulosic ethanol \u2014 the reductions can reach 85 percent in cases. What we\u2019re looking at is a huge tonnage of agricultural material \u2014 straw, for example \u2014 that is so valueless that for thousands of years farmers have simply left it on the fields to rot and emit. Turning something valueless into something value by deploying an application that converts waste field residue to a saleable product \u2014 one in great demand. It\u2019s the magical promise of advanced cellulosic fuels and a region like southwest Romania has more to gain from it than almost anyone.<\/p>\n
Podari, rising from the ashes
\nYou see more ruins in the immediate area than in a city that\u2019s lately preserved its Greek, Roman or Egyptian antiquities \u2014 but these are not ruins from the Classical Age, they are ruins of the Industrial Age.<\/p>\n
The sign sits proudly on a hill overlooking the Clariant sunliquid site. P-O-D-A-R-I, in giant white letters as big as the Hollywood sign and in the same style. If Podari never attracted the klieg lights before and the glamour of an advanced technology debut, it\u2019s not for the lack of trying, or hoping.<\/p>\n
Cargill was here, for one \u2014 presumably processing wheat \u2014 and the rusted out, idled equipment is all around you here. Some of that legacy is highly positive \u2014 because there\u2019s a willing base of growers, a surprising amount of solid infrastructure in place for a project of this type \u2014 not only to facilitate the delivery of the inputs, but the shipping of the outputs, ethanol and fertilizer. And if there is a small base of growers with baling equipment, we probably have Cargill to thank for that.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs you traveled here today,\u201d observed Clariant executive committee member Christian Kohlpaintner, \u201c we were not the first to build an industrial plant ere. You can see the\u00a0remains of factories originated from as early as the 1950s. In fact, what you see here today is after several months of demolition and clearance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey call it industrial conversion. The replacement of a value chain that is obsolete or not competitive with another. Now, this site is based on advanced and cutting edge. Now, Romania is at Europe\u2019s leading edge in technology. And, it\u2019s an example of how innovation and sustainability become a tangible reality in this plant. This plant will offer the proof that a technology we have already been operating in Straubing, Bavaria for six years can be used at industrial scale. And it will prove that we can use agricultural residues for fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n
It turns out that Romania is sometimes exactly where you want to execute a flagship, first-commercial, advanced technology project. First of all, the people are hungry for them, prideful in their country as they are, the deployment of advanced technology is a statement to the populace \u2014 and regional competitors \u2014 that Romania is on the move. And then, conventional projects don\u2019t always have quite the favored geographies, clustering and economies of scale that they need, here \u2014 and advanced technology can offer the breakthrough economics that turns conventional project cemeteries into advanced technology showcases.<\/p>\n
A generation ago, not long after the fall of the communist regime, Romania found itself with a less-than-spectacular mobile phone network, and became one the first countries to aggressively adopt the advanced GSM standard \u2014 which became the global standard \u2014 and in the late 1990s it was just incredible how widely deployed and robust the mobile business became. Then as now, advanced technology provided the leap that countries like Romania needed \u2014 and they went directly from telephone backwater to advanced showcase with services like Connex and Dialog.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s much the same today \u2014 flagship technology \u2014 in this case cellulosic ethanol technology, and a far-sighted parent of that technology in Clariant \u2014 has proven to be the ticket to the future that countries like Romania have needed.<\/p>\n
The cellulosic ethanol industry and movement could use a leap, too. We\u2019ve covered elsewhere the technological differentiation of Clariant technology \u2014 here, it\u2019s worth noting that what makes this project different and special is not just the technology, it\u2019s a team that has been watching all the technology developments in this sector as carefully as a scout on the pioneer trail looks at the ground for signs of water, trouble and the right direction ahead. These dudes are students of cellulosic technology like you wouldn\u2019t believe \u2014 intent on capitalizing on everything that\u2019s gone right for the industry and avoiding the mistakes of the past in scale-up.<\/p>\n
We have two years to wait, more or less, from this groundbreaking until the completion of construction and the commencement of commissioning of the plant. But we have six years of work at the large integrated pilot unit at Straubing, Germany that Clariant has run. There have been more hours on that project than some full-scale commercial projects we\u2019ve seen.<\/p>\n
A good day
\nWe\u2019ve seen projects driven by economics, by the desire to showcase technologies, by the imperatives of sustainability. This one is different \u2014 built not only in a corner of the EU that where conventional technology has struggled, but built at a time when too much advanced thinking has gone into deploying conventional technology, and too much conventional thinking has gone into deploying advanced technology. It\u2019s time for advanced thinking about how to deploy advanced technology, and we have it right here in Podari.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s timely.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are different opinions as to when our reserves of oil & gas will run out,\u201d as Christian Kohlpaintner observed, \u201cbut one thing is true, resources are not infinite, we must manage more wisely, and we now face the necessity of choosing climate friendly alternatives.\u201c<\/p>\n
\u201cWe promise to be a good neighbor, Kohlpaintner added. \u201cWe hope our plant will impact positively the region\u2019s agricultural industry, and we will provide 100 to 120 permanent and 700 construction jobs. And 300 jobs will be created in supporting this plant with services and materials. We will recruit locally, and train these people at our demonstration unit so they can learn to operate this technology. Which makes this a very good day \u2014 not only for Clariant, but for the European Union, and for Romania too. Let\u2019s enjoy it, the first I hope of many that we will be able to celebrate with you in Podari.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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