NO REBUILD: WHY SYNGAPURE WAS DESIGNED TO RETROFIT THE GASIFIER YOU ALREADY RUN

The question plant operators ask us first is never about tar. It is: do I have to rebuild my plant? The answer is no, and that was a design constraint from day one, not a line added after the fact. SyngaPure is a modular syngas cleaning platform, three stages (catalytic tar reforming, particulate filtration, sorbent-based contaminant removal) under one AI control layer, built to sit downstream of an existing gasifier and be configured for the feedstock and the output target. Greenfield economics kill most good gasification technology before it ever reaches a site. Retrofit is how good cleaning actually gets installed.

WHY NOW

The industry record on greenfield is not ambiguous. Enerkem has one commercial plant after 24 years. Fulcrum filed Chapter 11 in 2024. Entrade is insolvent. Agnion and Andritz spent EUR 41 million on a heatpipe reformer and stopped. Every one of those projects bet on a new build and lost on the jump from bench conditions to industrial conditions, where real feedstock variability triggers catalyst poisoning, tar fouling, and sorbent degradation.

The same wall exists for operators who already run a gasifier. The machine was bought, permitted, and commissioned. The cleaning train underperforms on variable waste, the engine or downstream process suffers, and the fix that gets offered is a new plant with a bigger budget. That is a bad trade. The gasifier, the engine, the grid connection, and the permit are sunk. What is weak is the gas cleaning between the reactor outlet and the consumer, and that is the one part that can be upgraded without touching the rest.

The economics of incremental deployment show up elsewhere in this industry too. The X-150 platform was developed for roughly EUR 7 million and delivered a 2,500-hour validated campaign where comparable efforts spent EUR 41 million and stopped. Staged, modular, retrofit-friendly engineering is not a compromise. It is the only version of this technology that ships at all.

WHAT WE BUILT

SyngaPure is three physical stages and one control loop. The catalytic tar reformer cracks tars, the filter removes particulates, the sorbent bed handles sulfur and other contaminants, and a single AI layer coordinates all three as one system instead of three boxes that each pretend the others do not exist. That architecture was chosen because feedstock composition moves. The cleaning has to move with it.

The same architecture is why retrofit is natural rather than bolted on. The stages are skid-mounted units with defined inlet and outlet connections, sized for the gas flow rather than for a specific gasifier make. The control layer is feedstock-agnostic by design: it reads inlet composition and adjusts the stages in real time, which is exactly what is needed when the unit is paired with a gasifier built by someone else. Site work for a stage is tie-ins and commissioning, on the order of two technicians for two weeks including a 72-hour acceptance run.

The cleaning chemistry itself has field data behind it. In integrated operation on the X-150 at the COMETHA site in Paris, the platform logged more than 2,500 validated hours, sustained 99.98% tar conversion, posted 94% uptime including scheduled maintenance, and completed 47 automated start and stop cycles. The tar reformer now on the bench under the BMWK go-inno programme is being tested against a single bar: hold outlet tar under 10 mg/Nm3 repeatedly, while the inlet load moves, not once with a perfectly prepared feedstock. That is the difference between a chemistry result and a plant that stays online.

Configured for the output target is a real requirement, because the thresholds differ by orders of magnitude. Industrial heat is the forgiving case: our own burner consumes raw syngas carrying 4 to 12 g/Nm3 of tar, with the SiC throat insert managing deposition in combustion. An engine needs its tar in milligrams per cubic metre. A Fischer-Tropsch or methanol loop is another world: sulfur below 0.1 ppmv (1 ppmv absolute ceiling for cobalt catalysts), ammonia in parts per billion, tar under 10 ppmv, particulates under 0.1 mg/Nm3. Raw syngas sits 10 to 100,000 times above those limits. Nobody sells one cleaning product that covers that spread honestly. A modular train that can be staged and sized per application is the honest way to cover it.

THE FIVE INPUTS THAT DECIDE FIT

To give a real answer rather than a brochure answer, we need five things from an operator.

Gasifier type and operating envelope. The same cleaning hardware behaves differently behind a downdraft, an updraft, or a fluidised bed, and the temperature and pressure window of the raw gas decides where the train can connect.

Feedstock mix and how much it varies week to week. A plant on clean wood chips at constant moisture is a different problem from one on digestate, sewage sludge, or MSW pellets. Variability is what the AI control layer exists to absorb, but we need to know how much variability there actually is.

What the current cleaning train already handles. We do not replace working equipment for the sake of it. SyngaPure stages sit downstream of existing hardware and only take over the duties the current train cannot carry.

The target application. Fuel cells, methanol synthesis, an engine, and industrial heat have different purity thresholds, as laid out above. The output target sets the stage count, the operating point, and the cost.

The physical footprint available. Space is usually the constraint nobody mentions until commissioning. Skids need floor area, access for catalyst exchange, and a route for the tie-in piping.

With those five inputs we can tell you whether SyngaPure fits your plant, or whether it does not. Both answers are useful. The second one is faster, and we would rather give it early than sell a configuration that dies in month nine.

WHY IT MATTERS

Design work across the ten disciplines is complete, and component prototyping is underway with BMWK go-inno backing. The honest caveat: bench conditions are not plant conditions, and the retrofit engineering on third-party gasifiers will be proven at prototype and industrial validation stages, not before. We are not pretending otherwise.

What we are saying is that the installed base of gasifiers does not need to be written off. The sunk capital is the reason to upgrade the cleaning train rather than the reason to abandon the site. Retrofit keeps the asset, the permit, and the feedstock contract, and replaces the one subsystem that decides whether the plant runs in month one or dies in month nine.

Operators: what would actually make a retrofit a yes for you, payback period, footprint, or installation downtime? That is the question we are designing around.