Herne Green Deal

Herne Green Deal

Back in 1962 our Herne site in Germany became the birthplace of isophorone chemistry. Today, the site is still making history as it leads the way in lowering energy consumption and enabling more sustainable chemical production. As a pilot project for Evonik's sustainability journey to climate neutrality, the "Herne Green Deal" has the target of reducing emissions and for the plant to run completely independent of fossil fuels, including eliminating fossil-based raw materials from production.

Evonik started at an early stage to support its customers with innovative products and solutions to help them take new, sustainable paths to achieve their goals in terms of environmental and climate protection, circularity or biodiversity. With the ambitious target of sustainable chemical production and achieving climate-neutrality for the entire Group, Evonik is investing €700 million in its production processes and infrastructure technology resources by 2030. These next-gen technologies will reduce the resources and energy we use, to lower our production carbon footprint to achieve sustainability. A key part of this investment innovation driver in technology and energy turnaround, is delivering more sustainable production by using less fossil-based resources at our Herne Crosslinkers site. 

The green energy transition at Herne includes more sustainable isophorone production with our eCO series of products that use renewable raw material resources, and with its holistic transformation, the long-term ambition of the "Herne Green Deal" is to make the plant completely independent of fossil fuels and fossil-based raw materials. In this way, the site could not only become a role model for sustainable production at Evonik, but for the entire global chemical industry.

With 17 production plants spanning over 250,000 square meters, as with all chemical production the Herne site produces energy in the form of heat. Capturing this waste heat energy and reducing emissions to optimize production by reusing it, rather than releasing it unused into the atmosphere has long been a sustainable objective of the global chemical industry. No strangers to being pioneers in chemical production and environmental protection, one of the first projects of the climate neutral Herne Green Deal was utilizing heat sustainably by feeding waste heat from its cooling towers (which, so far had been unused because of the low temperature level) into the district heating network. The innovative project, known as TORTE ("Technical Options for Thermal Energy Recovery"), has seen local energy supplier Uniper install a large-scale heat pump at the site and the industrial waste heat from production at Herne will be used to heat more than 1000 local homes.

Commending the innovation as a benchmark for a holistic sustainable transformation for a chemical production site towards green production and environmental protection, the TORTE project was awarded first place at the German chemical industry association’s (the VCI) 2023 Responsible Care competition. The independent jury when explaining its winning verdict said "The use of high-temperature heat pumps for district heating is still absolutely in its infancy - even more so when industrial waste heat is used for this purpose. In this respect, this is a very innovative project."
More about the Responsible Care Award