COSiMa: CO2-neutral Saint-Gobain industrial site Herzogenrath - feasibility study

 

Due to the ambitious yet urgent climate targets of the Paris Climate Agreement, industry as well as national and regional policy makers are called upon to act. Energy-intensive industry, with a demand for high-temperature heat, faces a major challenge. Electrification and the use of hydrogen can represent an important building block for the decarbonization of energy-intensive industry. The glass producer Saint-Gobain has set itself the goal of achieving CO₂ neutrality by 2050. The Institute für Technical Thermodynamics supports the company in this goal.

An important building block is the project "COSiMa - CO₂-neutral Saint-Gobain industrial site Herzogenrath". As part of COSiMa, the possibilities of an innovative CO₂-neutral glass production and processing site in Herzogenrath, which will be one of the first of its kind in the world, will be examined until the beginning of 2025. To this end, the use of green hydrogen for glass production, energy-saving measures for glass processing into automotive glazing, and the optimal energy use and generation at the entire site in terms of energy and business management are to be investigated and modeled in cooperation with the city of Herzogenrath and neighboring municipalities. Hydrogen and renewable electricity could save more than 100,000 tons of CO₂ per year at the Herzogenrath site in the future. The project is being carried out in cooperation with Saint-Gobain Sekurit Germany, Saint-Gobain Glass Germany, the Gas and Heat Institute in Essen, the Institute for Industrial Furnace Construction and Heat Technology and the Institute for Power Generation and Storage Systems at RWTH Aachen University.

The focus of the work at the Institute of Technical Thermodynamics is on energy system modeling and optimization. Connecting the energy within the framework of a smart infrastructure of the industrial site aims to achieve an optimized use of all energy and material flows at the site to ensure CO₂ neutrality that is also economically viable for the future. Mathematical optimization methods are used and developed to evaluate the different options for the decarbonization of industrial energy systems.