Siemens build industrial power plant

Siemens will build a high­ly effi­cient com­bined cycle pow­er plant as a turnkey project at the Marl Chem­i­cal Park in North Rhine-West­phalia, Ger­many. The order was placed by the spe­cial­ty chem­i­cal group Evonik Indus­tries. The new indus­tri­al pow­er plant will con­sist of two units, each with an elec­tri­cal capac­i­ty of 90 megawatts, and pro­duce both elec­tric­i­ty and process steam for the chem­i­cal park. The site’s inte­grat­ed steam net­work will also sup­ply dis­trict heat for about 2,000 homes in the future. The plant’s fuel effi­cien­cy will thus exceed 90 per­cent. With this com­bined cycle pow­er plant, Evonik will replace its last coal-fired plant at the Marl Chem­i­cal Park. Because the plant will pro­duce envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly elec­tric­i­ty, process steam, and dis­trict heat from nat­ur­al gas, the com­pa­ny will be able to cut CO2 emis­sions by one mil­lion met­ric tons per year. The plant thus makes an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to decar­boniza­tion. Con­struc­tion is sched­uled to begin lat­er in 2019, and the pow­er plant is expect­ed to go into oper­a­tion in 2022. Siemens Finan­cial Ser­vices (SFS), Siemens’ financ­ing arm, devel­oped a leas­ing financ­ing solu­tion specif­i­cal­ly for Evonik in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Siemens Gas and Pow­er. Togeth­er with the KfW IPEX Bank and LBBW, SFS will han­dle refi­nanc­ing of the leas­ing agree­ment. The project vol­ume is in the low­er triple-dig­it mil­lion euro range.

“In build­ing this pow­er plant, whose tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial con­cept was worked out joint­ly between Siemens and Evonik, we’re help­ing Evonik sig­nif­i­cant­ly cut its CO2 emis­sions,” said Michael Beck­er, CFO of Siemens Gas and Pow­er. “In addi­tion, the state-of-the-art plant will ensure a reli­able sup­ply of elec­tric­i­ty and process steam for the chem­i­cal park. The abil­i­ty to use var­i­ous gas­es as fuel is anoth­er ben­e­fit and fur­ther increas­es the plant’s eco­nom­ic feasibility.”

“In decid­ing to build the new pow­er plant, we’re end­ing our coal-based pro­duc­tion of elec­tric­i­ty and steam in Marl after more than 80 years, and cut­ting the direct annu­al green­house gas emis­sions of our plants by near­ly one fifth world­wide,” said Thomas Wes­sel, Chief Human Resources Offi­cer at Evonik. “We are pleased to have Siemens at our side, a reli­able part­ner who is help­ing us to achieve our ambi­tious cli­mate goals.”

“Siemens Finan­cial Ser­vices’ struc­tur­ing exper­tise and expe­ri­ence in the ener­gy sec­tor for years enabled us to offer a financ­ing solu­tion tai­lored to the customer’s needs,” said Veroni­ka Bienert, CFO of Siemens Finan­cial Ser­vices. “This made it pos­si­ble to imple­ment the project in close coop­er­a­tion with Siemens Gas and Pow­er, which is pro­vid­ing the tech­nol­o­gy and ser­vice activities.”

Siemens’ scope of sup­ply includes the turnkey con­struc­tion of two iden­ti­cal pow­er plant units as well as one indus­tri­al gas tur­bine, and one indus­tri­al steam tur­bine for each unit. It also includes gen­er­a­tors, aux­il­iary sys­tems, and the con­trol system.

Siemens will car­ry out pre­ven­tive main­te­nance work on both gas tur­bines for a peri­od of 15 years under a long-term ser­vice agree­ment. This agree­ment also cov­ers remote diag­nos­tic ser­vices for dai­ly plant mon­i­tor­ing and month­ly analy­ses of the oper­at­ing data. These dig­i­tal ser­vices will ensure high plant availability.

Thanks to the use of spe­cial heat recov­ery steam gen­er­a­tors and cat­a­lysts, the sys­tem can oper­ate on nat­ur­al gas as well as re-gasi­fied liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas (LNG), and var­i­ous oth­er gas­es, such as resid­ual gas from pro­duc­tion process­es. Each pow­er plant unit can pro­duce not only elec­tric­i­ty but also up to 220 met­ric tons of process steam per hour. Thanks to the plant’s high flex­i­bil­i­ty that enables it to com­pen­sate for the fluc­tu­at­ing infeed of renew­able ener­gy into the pow­er grid and its abil­i­ty to pro­duce dis­trict heat, it is also sup­port­ing the ener­gy tran­si­tion in Germany.