Phil recently visited Germany on a collaboration and partnership mission around CO2 conversion technologies. He visited Germany’s national labs – Max Planck Institutes, Helmholtz Institutes, and Fraunhofer Institutes as well as Siemen’s labs across the country to discuss collaboration and partnership opportunities.
Executive Summary
Germany has a number of state-funded projects on CO2 conversion ranging from 1M Euros to >60M Euros spanning industry led, industry-academia/SME, and federal-lab based projects. This research is driven by Germany’s increase of intermittent renewable solar and wind – it has achieved 100% renewable for brief moments in 2018. Connections to the three major nationally funded labs (Max Planck, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz) as well as to Siemens was established. The meetings were overwhelmingly positive with next steps identified for the majority of interactions.
The size and scale of the activities in Germany with respect to CO2 conversion and electrolysis systems was impressive – hundreds of millions have been invested including a 50MW plant under construction in Leuna, Germany’s largest petrochemical park. It was extremely humbling to see the pace of scale up and the intensity of work being done.