Designs are Underway for Seratech’s Pilot Plant

Seratech is excited to announce that it has teamed up with Xytel, a global specialist in advanced, automated pilot plants and process systems engineering, to start designing a modular pilot plant which it hopes will be effective from July 2025.

“We’re still in the early stages of development”, explains Seratech Chemical Engineer, Dr Usama Mohamed, who is leading the project.

“The first step is to complete a pre-FEED (Preliminary Front End Engineering Design). This process will take around three months after which point the design will be ready to translate into a facility”.

As with any novel process, such as Seratech’s, which will eventually scale up commercially, a pilot plant is necessary to address general feasibility and transition the technology from lab- to industrial scale. The 1000 tonnes of materials produced by the pilot each year will be used to trial ultraMAFIX and magCARB with customers at ready mix concrete plants and concrete products manufacturers, and to complete the first real-world demonstrations of them.

“When you scale up a process there will inevitably be technical issues, economic problems and safety elements to address,” explains Usama. “A pilot plant acts as a way to bridge that gap before commercialisation”.

“For starters we might need a large industrial jaw crusher rather than a pestle and mortar,” he quips. “In terms of economics it will give us a clear picture of the quantities of raw material required, the amount of labour needed, the energy use, equipment required and clear costings around running the operation.

Seratech has chosen a semi-continuous, automated process that will capture 1 tonne of CO2 per day with minimum human interference. Eventually, the commercial scale process will also work on its own and be monitored by operators and engineers. “If the pH drops, the system will automatically adjust the alkalinity by adding more base to restore balance to the solution. Or, if the temperature drops, the process would readjust itself to the desired temperature”.

Usama has worked on Seratech’s process since inception at lab scale and has a strong understanding and feel of how the facility should be designed. The plan is to keep it running for around a year to test the feasibility of the process and the materials, “but it all depends on what obstacles we come across – hopefully not many!”

According to Usama, the team is feeling motivated, optimistic and really excited about this next step: “It’s when we can demonstrate and prove to the world that our process actually works and is not just in research papers and in the lab”.