The South Korean company, CARBON CDM KOREA Ltd. of Seoul, a subsidiary of Carbon Projektentwicklung GmbH of Austria, has commissioned Uhde to design and supply key components for three tail gas treatment units based on the EnviNOx® technology. The EnviNOx® units will be installed in three existing nitric acid plants built by Uhde for Hu-Chems Fine Chemical Corp. at Yeosu, some 300 km south-east of Seoul.

The contract includes the licence, engineering, supply of key equipment and supervision of the commissioning activities. The units are scheduled to come on-stream in early 2007.

Uhde's EnviNOx® process uses a special catalyst to convert the pollutant nitrogen oxides, i.e. nitrous oxide (N2O) and NOx, in the tail gas streams of nitric acid plants into the naturally occurring substances nitrogen, oxygen and water vapour. This environment- and climate-friendly technology has received several awards, one of them international.

Future annual emissions at the Yeosu plants will be reduced by approximately 4,800 tonnes of nitrous oxide. As the global warming potential of nitrous oxide is estimated to be 310 times that of carbon dioxide (CO2), this corresponds to a CO2 reduction of approximately 1.5 million tonnes per year.

Uhde's new contract is embedded in a project for the achievement of climate protection goals based on the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) defined in the Kyoto Protocol. Such projects enable industrialised nations to obtain greenhouse emission reduction credits in other countries and transfer them for their own use. They are subject to the rules and standards of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which, for example, require an approved methodology for achieving and monitoring emission reductions.

A project-independent CDM methodology for achieving and monitoring nitrous oxide emission reductions in nitric acid plants was developed on the basis of the innovative Uhde EnviNOx® technology by Carbon Projektentwicklung GmbH in cooperation with Uhde GmbH within the framework of a previous contract for an EnviNOx® tail gas treatment unit for Abu Qir Fertilizer Company in Egypt and submitted for approval. The methodology, which is applicable to all process variants of the EnviNOx® technology, was officially approved by the UNFCCC on March 3, 2006. It is the first and so far only approved methodology for reducing nitrous oxide emissions from nitric acid plants