Located at the wastewater treatment plant Avedøre in Copenhagen, the BioCat Project has an overall budget of DKK 49.9 million (€6.7 million). Once operational, it will be the largest power-to-gas1 facility based on biological methanation in the world, according to the pan-European BioCat Consortium.
The main objective of the project “Power-to-Gas via Biological Catalysis (P2G-BioCat)” is to design, engineer, construct, and test a 1MW power-to-gas facility at the wastewater treatment plant Avedøre in Copenhagen, Denmark. During 3,000 hours of operation, the facility will use wind energy produced in times of low power demand to produce hydrogen by means of water electrolysis. This hydrogen is then combined with CO2 and converted by microorganisms to methane -- the principal component of natural gas. After this methanation step, the renewable gas will be injected into a low-pressure gas distribution grid supplying the greater Copenhagen area.
“Once in the grid, the renewable gas can be stored for long periods of time, transported geographically via existing pipelines, and used for power production, in transportation, or for heating applications in households and industry," Mich Hein, CEO of Electrochaea, explains. "As such, power-to-gas represents a powerful solution, not only for the energy storage challenge but also for decarbonizing the transportation sector."
The project has an overall budget of DKK 49.9 million (€6.7 million) and is generously supported by ForskEL, a technology demonstration support scheme administered by Energinet.dk, the operator of the Danish power and gas transmission grids.
According to Dominic Hofstetter, BioCat project manager and vice president of business development at Electrochaea, the facility will be operated according to an optimised trading strategy developed with a view toward maximizing value capture and mimicking the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy. Additional project objectives include the delivery of frequency regulation services to the Danish power grid and the recycling of heat and oxygen in the on-site wastewater treatment processes, he added.
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1. Power-to-Gas is an innovative energy storage technology capable of stockpilinglarge amounts of excess electricity produced in energy systems with high penetration of intermittent renewables (mainly wind and solar energy). By converting electrical energy to chemical energy in the form of methane, energy can be injected into the existing natural gas infrastructure to a practically unlimited extent.