Kempten / District - Hydrogen: As the first player in the "Hydrogen future region HyAllgäu", the Kempten sewage association is selling projects.
There is funding from the federal government.
Only recently Bavaria gave the Kempten sewage association a subsidy for the stratified heat storage system.
Now there is another funding notification on the desk of business and operations manager Franz Beer.
The “Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety” intends to support hydrogen production at the sewage treatment plant with almost ten million euros.
The sewage treatment plant is already producing more electricity than it consumes.
With the production of hydrogen, a further 11,000 tons of CO2 should be saved annually.
More gas
In order to obtain the necessary amount of electricity for the energy-intensive production of hydrogen, the amount of digester gas should be increased.
For this, more concentrated wastewater is poured into the bulging putrefaction containers of the wastewater association.
There are “partial flows that can be used twice,” explains operations manager Beer.
At 37 to 38 degrees Celsius, a gas consisting of 60 to 65 percent methane is produced there in the absence of oxygen.
“The rest is CO2,” says Beer.
A separation plant that is promoted cleans the methane of CO2, so that biomethane remains.
In addition, the AVKE will receive a biogas line from the Kempten-Schlatt fermentation plant.
At the Zweckverband für Abfallwirtschaft Kempten (ZAK), bio-waste ferment into compost and also produce biogas in the process.
This amount of methane is then used to feed a new block-type thermal power station that produces electricity.
The subsidized CHP has an output of up to 1.5 megawatts.
Electricity and biogas can be used in the mobility sector.
And “if we have too much electricity, we separate water into water and oxygen,” says Beer, “we are flexible”.
Beer already has some potential buyers for the hydrogen.
“It has to be used communally.
But we can definitely get under our amount ”, says the manager.
In addition, the wastewater association is purchasing an electricity storage facility with a capacity of two megawatt hours.
This is intended to compensate for current peaks.
Beer also wants to use this storage facility as an emergency power storage facility and replace the current diesel generator sets.
The AVKE would like to use the oxygen that is generated during hydrogen production later in wastewater treatment and thus save up to two more gigawatt hours of electricity.
The sewage treatment plant will be climate-positive
The AVKE group sewage treatment plant has so far emitted around 1,600 tons of greenhouse gas per year.
With the recent savings of eleven tons per year, the sewage treatment plant will not only be climate-neutral, but also climate-positive from 2025, Beer is happy to say.
In the HY-Allgäu area, the association is the first actor to complete a project.
"Without a hen, no egg", says Beer, "we now have the necessary start-up funding."
