To check the perfect compliance of the gas injected from a methanizer, it is necessary to create a “permanent leak” at the injection station, in order to take the measurements, describes Frédéric Niciejewski, director of Actemium in Laxou, near Nancy.
Subsidiary of the Vinci group (turnover: €69 billion; 280,000 employees), an integral part of the 140 companies making up Actemium (turnover: €3 billion; 22,500), the industry specialist within the group, Actemium, which weighs 12 million euros in turnover and employs 47 employees, has just developed a solution to put an end to this practice. A method which is not trivial: on the scale of a single injection station, 50 tonnes of CO equivalent2 are released every year.
Aspirate gas then reinject it
“The challenge is to be able to control what has passed through the pipe for less than three minutes and for this, methane must be released into the atmosphere,” explains Frédéric Niciejewski. Requested by GRTgaz, the manager of the gas transport network, the Actémium team imagined a solution, called “Zero emissions”: concretely, the path followed consisted of sucking up the gas to create a dead arm to avoid discharges. “Today, it’s as if, to analyze the temperature of a car on the highway, we made it take an exit ramp and left it in the parking lot,” illustrates the Actemium manager. “With our solution, the car takes the ramp and immediately, another ramp allows it to re-enter traffic.”
Avoid peripheral releases of CO2
Launched a year and a half ago, the studies led to a “Zero Emission” injection station that has been on trial for six months, near a methanizer based in the Grand Est. “The solution is proven, it meets the demand”, affirms Frédéric Niciejewski, for an additional cost of the order of “a few tens of thousands of euros”. Of the 1,200 methanizers currently in service in France, 650 directly inject biogas into the network and could therefore be updated with the technology developed by Actémium. For a potential saving of 32,500 tonnes of CO equivalent2 per year. For the moment, Frédéric Niciejewski anticipates a deployment on the new injection stations, the old ones could therefore be taken over during a second phase, depending on the capacity to reinvest in the equipment already in service.
Marked interest in the gas sector
“Our gas customers have a real desire to improve their processes to reduce emissions,” points out the Actémium manager. The solution developed by the Lorraine team caught the attention of the European Biogas Association and Frédéric Niciejewski was invited to present it in Brussels at the end of October. “It is certain that certain industrialists or certain players in the gas world in the broad sense will contact us in the coming months to understand how this solution could be adapted to their process,” believes the Actémium manager.
