Deißlingen: From green electricity to a sustainable biofuel – moving away from fossil natural gas

Our longtime customer BRS Bioenergie GmbH has recently inaugurated his new biomethane production plant in Deißlingen, Germany and is injecting since several weeks the produced biomethane into the regional natural gas grid. The biomethane is used from now on as sustainable biofuel at other locations in Germany by using the natural gas grid as transport system. We from proweps envirotec are very proud having participated in all relevant areas of this successful project from the beginning, and we have provided specific services over the last years of the development and realization of this new plant as:

• Feasibility study
• General planning
• Project management
• Approval procedure according to the federal commission of control law
• Tender biogas upgrading plant
• Coordination with natural gas grid operator to inject biomethane
• Coordination of realization of a new natural gas pipeline
• Coordination of RedCert certification procedure
• Coordination of biomethane supply contract
• Supervision of construction and commissioning

This is one of the official press releases from the official inauguration of the plant:

Press release District of Tuttlingen, Germany, 18.07.2023

Bio natural gas for 2000 households is made from organic waste – Deisslinger processing plant put into operation / Brown bins provide renewable energy

Organic waste is a recyclable material that has it all. In Deißlingen, the company BRS Bioenergie uses organic waste from the three districts of Rottweil, Schwarzwald-Baar and Tuttlingen – and where electricity was previously fed into the public grid, organic natural gas is now flowing into the region. The district administrators of the Schwarzwald-Baar-Heuberg region have now put the new system into operation.

Eberhard Ludwig, Managing Director of BRS Bioenergie GmbH, gave a brief overview of the project at the biogas processing plant. ,,Here 25 million kilowatt hours of the purest biomethane gas are produced every year from up to 40,000 tons of municipal organic waste”. According to his research, according to Ludwig, this is the first biomethane production from waste in Baden-Württemberg.

“Advanced production requires advanced presentation,” Eberhard Ludwig continues. That’s why he set ChatGPT the task of writing a paean to biomethane. The result caused a lot of laughter in the audience – because the artificial intelligence had the task very literally taken: “Oh biomethane, you noble fuel, born from the remnants of our society, you are the shining star in the darkness of the fossil one’s fuels”.

Eberhard Ludwig thanked everyone involved in the project – in addition to the Mayor of Deißlingen, Ralf Ulbrich, especially those responsible for the three districts. ,,The early and far-sighted decision of the political committees and administrations of the three districts for an energetically oriented biowaste recycling has the future-oriented project of biomethane production made possible.” He expressed a thank you with special praise to all employees of BRS Bioenergie who had been under construction site conditions since the start of the project ensuring that the region’s organic waste was still properly recycled.

BRS Bioenergie already has the next project in the pipeline: the CO2 that is separated in the biogas processing plant is to be processed and liquefied to such a high quality that it can even be used in the food sector.

“For more than 20 years, an ecological company of rank has been created here through ingenuity, which is constantly reinventing itself.” This is how the district administrator described it Dr. Michel referred to the company BRS Bioenergie in his welcoming address, which he delivered on behalf of all three district administrators. He described Deißlingen as a very special place – on the one hand because it is geographically the center of the region, on the other hand because it symbolizes how good the cooperation between the three districts of Rottweil, Tuttlingen and Schwarzwald-Baar is.

Managing Director Martin Handke gave a deeper insight into the new technology. The process is complex: In the BGAA in Deißlingen, the raw biogas that is produced during fermentation is converted into biomethane, i.e. bio natural gas. The methane contained in the raw biogas must be freed from carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and water. These components are washed out with an organic absorbent, leaving almost nothing but methane. Moisture has to be extracted from it before it is handed over to the terranets bw biogas feed system, the interface for the public gas network. The biomethane production plant in Deisslingen can supply around 25 million kilowatt-hours a year – this means that around 2000 average households can be supplied per year.