(The project was successfully completed at the end of December 2014).

The project "HTC in Lower Saxony - Development, optimization and modeling of a continuously operating pilot plant" is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Approximately 2 million euros are being provided by the EU and the state of Lower Saxony. The project aims to develop a scalable concept for the construction and operation of a continuously operating hydrothermal carbonization plant. This is intended to move HTC technology in Lower Saxony from experimental status to practical maturity.

A project goal: Mobile HTC plant, photomontage BR SZST

To achieve this goal, a total of five universities in Lower Saxony are contributing their expertise to the ERDF project: Biomass to be carbonized is selected by the Institute of Biology and Environmental Sciences at the University of Oldenburg and made available to the partners. Basic research on HTC will be carried out in the Laboratory Department of Process Engineering at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences and the Institute of Technical Chemistry at the Technical University of Braunschweig. The results obtained will be used to develop a pilot plant at the Institute of Biotechnology and Environmental Research at the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences in Wolfenbüttel, which will later be fully accounted for by the Institute of Sustainable Energy and Environmental Technology at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Göttingen. The individual work groups and work phases are additionally supported by a process simulation from the Institute of Physics at the University of Oldenburg. The development and optimization of the system is the focus of the joint work of the collaborative partners, in order to gain fundamental insights into the design of different HTC systems for the widest possible range of applications. The project is expanding to include application-oriented research, such as the use of contaminated biomass.

Project collaboration "HTC in Niedersachsen"

Since 01.11.2012, the complementary and also ERDF-funded project of the FH Hannover, Prof. Stiller, has also been running:

In this process, landscape management material used in both projects is to be fermented into biogas. In this way, it should be possible to determine which process is better suited for the utilization of these materials, which are currently not economically usable, or whether a combination of the processes represents the best utilization. Further information on this project can be found hier.