Earlier today, Quantafuel made its long-awaited Proof of Concept (PoC) announcement for its Skive chemical recycling plant. Skive, in Denmark is the location of the company’s first commercial production facility. Its first test facility was built in Mexico in 2014.
The Skive plant, said Quantafuel, had operated for more than seven days continuously at a level corresponding to an annual capacity of 16,000 tonnes of plastic waste infeed.
The chemical recycling plant is the first of its kind in the world and is a major milestone for the company. It has now achieved the dual goals of recycling low-quality plastic and sustainable waste management.
The company has established a supply chain that integrates mechanical recycling, ensuring a continuous supply of plastic waste that is optimal for chemical recycling. The waste - from households in Norway and Denmark, which the company is paid to collect - is decomposed and gasified using pyrolysis technology. Next, impurities, such as ash, chlorine and sulphur are eliminated from the gas.
“Part of Quantafuel’s technology is a two-stage catalytic process in the gas phase. We maximize the valorisation of plastic waste by utilising carefully-engineered catalysts to increase the quality of desirable hydrocarbons,” said the company.
The gas is then condensed and separated into oil fractions through distillation.
The PoC announcement had been expected to be made at an earlier date, but was postponed due to mechanical issues in the feeding system, reported late in December, followed by a period of downtime due to damage of the steel cone connecting the burner chamber with the flue gas heating box of the reactor. This has since been successfully repaired.
“Reaching this milestone is an important breakthrough for the company and for chemical recycling. It has taken us longer than anticipated, but systematic problem-solving by the entire organisation the past few months has made it possible. Following the upgrades made in the fourth quarter, we have known that our process and technology works. Now we have also managed to improve and balance the uptime and capacity,” said Quantafuel’s CEO, Lars Rosenløv.
“The last two weeks in January, Quantafuel processed 100 tonnes a week. Over the past seven days, we have converted 145 tonnes with the same two lines. This PoC level corresponds to 16,000 tonnes annually at plant level and previous runs have proven that the lines can run at an even higher level.”
The plant is on track to reach the 12,000 MT target for the full year 2022.
The achieved PoC equals more than seven days of continuous production with an uptime above 90% at 16,000 tonnes of annual capacity, with an overall oil yield of 68%.
All products manufactured in Skive will be shipped to BASF in Germany, who will upgrade the raw material to new plastic products and chemicals. We have sourced more than enough plastic waste – which we are paid to receive – and everything produced at the plant has already been sold to BASF.
Based on the learnings from the Skive plant, Quantafuel’s management and board of directors are now ready to move forward with the next generation of larger-scale Plastic-to-Liquid plants, advancing its goal of rapidly building up production capacity on a global scale.