Vulcan Energie Ressourcen GmbH commissioned the company MionTec to build the first pilot plant for process optimisation of the Zero Carbon Lithium® process.
We chose the company MionTec from Leverkusen for the planning and manufacturing of our first pilot plant, as they have profound knowledge in the fundamentals of ion exchangers and adsorption processes as well as decades of experience in pilot plant construction. With Dr. Dieter Mauer and his helpful team, we were able to flexibly design the planning phase of the plant and successfully commission it at MionTec on the agreed date.The infrastructure of the pilot plant and the use of MionTec’s chemical laboratory facilitated the smooth commissioning of the pilot plant. Its process technology is designed in such a way that it can be adapted at any time and at short notice. This type of control technology will ensure the successful process optimisation of the patented Vulcan Zero Carbon Lithium® process in the coming months.
We would like to thank the entire team at MionTec and look forward to further good cooperation in the next phases of the Zero Carbon Lithium® project.

I first heard about the Mi-Vision system from MionTec on the VGB Chemistry Conference in 2018, where Dieter Mauer presented the system, and we had a good talk about the possibilities for using the system at our power plants in Ørsted in Denmark. In 2019 we arranged with MionTec to rent the system for period at one of our power plants, the Asnæs Power Plant in Kalundborg. At this power plant we have three demin water lines, all three consisting of three IEX stages plus degasser and an upstream scavenger stage. With the Mi-Vision system we obtained a much better understanding of the demin plant, and the plant has been optimized in relation to the regeneration of the scavenger, throughput and chemical consumption with a significant cost saving as a result. Besides that, we have achieved knowledge about the conditions of the resins in the plant, which is helping us in the future planning of exchanging the resins. We are planning on using the Mi-Vision system as a trouble-shooter and an optimization tool occasionally and when needed. Renting the system for a couple of months together with the huge knowledge available in MionTec, will help us in optimizing our demin plants and to obtain potential cost savings.

As the operations foreman of our packed bed plants, the most obvious advantages of Mi-Vision for me are the savings in the quantity of regeneration agent and the more efficient use of the plant volume. We can produce more purified water between regenerations and have to regenerate less frequently. For us, this means a more economical plant operation.

Mi-Vision is a perfect tool for me to keep gaining new exciting insights into our packed bed plants. The high-resolution measured values are fully accessible and can therefore be used for evaluations. In addition, a large number of algorithms are already built into the system, e.g. for determining the capacity and ageing of all resins, to which one would otherwise only have access with great effort. This and the productive cooperation with the company MionTec enable us to optimise the operation of our plants more and more.

We had a 2-days audit of our demin plant by MionTec last year. Instead of an audit, I would rather describe this as a 2 days private training, focused on our plant. Although our plant was running stable and had no excess chemical consumption above supplier’s guidelines, there were still some significant improvements pointed out in the report. But above all, the most significant gains were enabled by the increased system understanding I got from Dr. Mauer. Due to the large size of our plant, this resulted in an ROI of +- 1 month for the audit, without any quality or stability compromise.