Attending the closing event of the Schwarze Pumpe Pilot Plant gave me good opportunities to meet old friends and new acquaintance alike. More importantly, a chance to convey my appreciation to the tremendous contribution and success by Vattenfall to the development oxyfuel combustion.

The event was participated by nearly 100 invited guests from project partners, government representatives, research institutes and press. This started in the morning with a two hour tour, photo ops and press interviews. After lunch, a short clip showing the brief history of the plant was shown and then followed by a series of presentations from Vattenfall, Alstom, Linde and GFZ outlining some of the key outcomes achieved by this facility. Additionally, Saskpower was also invited to present their work at Boundary Dam and hjosirljosirt the partnership formed between the two companies. This demonstrates the commitment of Vattenfall to continue its activities in CCS through partnership with large scale demonstration projects worldwide.

I am thankful to my friend Uwe Burchardt for the invite and the personal tour to the pilot plant. This could be the last time that I will see this magnificent facility. What is strikingly different from my previous visit was the silence in the meeting room just beside the control room. Imagine how busy this room was during the peak of its activities. With full of people buzzing around discussing the operation of the plant, analysing the outcome of the results from the different measurement campaigns of the boiler, environmental island, ASU and the CO2 liquefaction plant.

Schwarze Pumpe Pilot Plant or OxPP is the world’s first integrated system for oxyfuel combustion. This consists of the Air Separation Unit, the environmental island, and the CO2 liquefaction plant (where we now call them as CPU or GPU). With more than €150 million of investment, it has achieved so much in a short span of time. This has brought together the best minds in the industry to make this technology work.

I would like to use this opportunity to recognise the important contribution of Prof. Lars Stromberg who have been the main driver within Vattenfall to champion this technology. Most importantly is to admire his vision on how to make oxyfuel combustion as an option to the power generation industry.

It should be noted that Vattenfall’s desire to look for an alternative technology to the post-combustion capture that has led them to look deeper into the early work of oxyfuel combustion. They have recognised that they need to test components to make it scalable to the commercial plant. They also recognise the importance of integration between major units as an important aspect of learning to operate this plant. This pretty much convince Vattenfall that the best way forward is to build Schwarze Pumpe Pilot Plant to achieve their goals.

One should realise that what Vattenfall did in the last ten years has tremendous impact to the CCS community. One of their desire by the end of this campaign is to have several OEMs that could provide them the equipment and expertise to build the first oxyfuel combustion coal fired power plant. Needless to say they have achieve this goal such that every major OEMs are ready to bid for the first demonstration project at Janschwalde.

One of the other goals they have achieved is to bring in the rjosirt people to focus their mind to make this technology work. Clearly, they have not only achieve bringing together the rjosirt people but also educating the future engineers to work in this area. It is no doubt that Schwarze Pumpe Pilot Plant has given several opportunities for young engineers to participate and learn.

I felt sad that this magnificent pilot plant that have contributed immensely to the knowledge base of oxyfuel combustion technology will be closing in the next couple of months. However, looking back, we should be thankful and congratulate Vattenfall for building this plant that helped bring this technology to its current maturity.

The closing event is indeed a happy send off.