Saying goodbye to the classic diesel drive in rail transport is a goal for the railways in passenger transport.

Battery and hydrogen trains can be considered for new vehicle purchases, but new purchases are not always economical or sustainable, especially when it comes to replacing still young vehicles with combustion engines. In freight and heavy goods transport, the performance of classic internal combustion engines cannot be dispensed with at all for the time being.

Therefore, climate-friendly alternatives to diesel operation are necessary. One of these alternatives is the renewable fuel HVO diesel (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil).

Running on HVO significantly reduces CO2 emissions and makes it possible to run combustion engines in a climate-friendly way without having to carry out extensive retrofitting. HVO has already established itself as one of the important bridging technologies in rail transport (ClimateDiesel). Since its use, it has led to a saving of around 90% of CO2 emissions compared to fossil fuel and is thus an important step towards sustainable mobility.

However, as HVO is produced exclusively from used cooking oils and high-quality organic oils, it will be difficult to obtain sufficient quantities of raw materials.

CAPHENIA offers a sustainable supplement to HVO Diesel. We rely on CO2 recycling and biogas as raw materials, which makes the production volume of our reFuels such as Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SA F) practically unlimitedly scalable. This is of great importance for the aviation industry, which needs to replace large quantities of fossil fuels and SAF is currently the only alternative to kerosene.

The unavoidable by-product of the production of SAF is renewable diesel, which can be used as a climate-friendly alternative in rail transport, thus enabling maximum and immediate CO2 savings through the use of existing infrastructure.

Power-and-Biogas-to-Liquid (PBtL) is a process for the production of synthetic fuels. CAPHENIA has developed an innovative and patented PBtL technology for the production of climate-friendly reFuels. The CAPHENIA process is highly selective and leads to CO2 reductions of up to 92% compared to fossil fuels, bringing us closer to CO2 neutrality than any other fuel production route.

CAPHENIA is committed to innovation and sustainability and will begin building a pilot plant to produce renewable fuels through the power-and-biogas-to-liquid (PBtL) process at Industriepark Höchst later this year.

The Frankfurt Höchst site was chosen because the chemical park already offers an excellent infrastructure and supply of biogas and green electricity. CAPHENIA’s PBtL technology has already proven convincing in research, achieving a record efficiency of 86% in synthesis gas production. The pilot plant will demonstrate that the PBtL process is also efficient and economically viable in practice.

Due to the proximity to Frankfurt Airport and the demand for SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel) there, our pilot plant will also play an important role in meeting this demand and thus make a valuable contribution to CO2 neutrality in aviation.

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