Industrial waste heat for the district heating supply

Ruhr Oel GmbH - BP Gelsenkirchen (ROG) plans to use industrial waste heat for district heating supply in a joint project with Uniper Wärme GmbH (UWG). A letter of intent was recently signed for this purpose. A total of around 33 million euros is to be invested. The measure is an important step towards modernising and decarbonising the industrial network in the northern Ruhr area, with the BP refinery in Gelsenkirchen as the starting point primarily for the chemical industry.

"With this project, we are gaining heat and using the waste heat from the refinery's process plants more efficiently. According to initial calculations, this will enable us to save around 60,000 tons of CO2 emissions per year. With the heat output extracted from the refinery processes, we can supply up to 30,000 households in Gelsenkirchen, Gladbeck and as far as Recklinghausen," explains Nikola Feldmann, one of the two managing directors of Uniper Wärme.

"In its scale, the project is a beacon project in NRW and another important component of decarbonisation. By working in partnership with BP refinery Gelsenkirchen, we can achieve a win-win situation for all parties - the two companies, the environment and our customers," adds Jenny Banczyk, Managing Director of Uniper Wärme.

"The focus of our modernisation programme of around EUR 2 billion in the coming years is on improved energy efficiency and the reduction of emissions. The joint project with Uniper can make an important contribution to this," explains Andreas Salomon, Refining Optimization Manager and responsible for site strategy and energy management at Ruhr Oel GmbH - BP Gelsenkirchen.

After the project development phase, the still outstanding approval procedures, the implementation planning and finally the construction of the measure can be started from spring 2021. From the 4th quarter of 2022, the first heat could be fed into the district heating grid of UWG. According to initial concepts, up to 60 MW of industrial waste heat would be extracted from the northern part of the BP refinery of ROG in Gelsenkirchen Scholven. For this purpose, new source heat exchangers would be installed parallel to the existing infrastructure on the refinery site, which would extract the waste heat from eight sources in process plants. A later expansion by about ten to twelve MW would be conceivable.

The decoupled heat from the individual sources would then be collected via a separate infrastructure and routed to a new transfer station, which would be built at the northern boundary of the ROG site. The heat is to be fed into the UWG's heating network via a newly planned 2.7 kilometre long district heating pipeline.


Contact for journalists:

Uniper SE 
Ilona Flechtner
Business Communication
T +49 151 2 8134776
[email protected]

Ruhr Oel GmbH – BP Gelsenkirchen
Peter Alexewicz
Business Communication
T +49 (0) 209 88127784
[email protected]


About Uniper
Uniper is a leading international energy company with around 11,500 employees and activities in more than 40 countries. With about 34 GW of installed generation capacity, Uniper is among the largest global power generators. Its main activities include power generation in Europe and Russia as well as global energy trading, including a diversified gas portfolio that makes Uniper one of Europe’s leading gas companies. In 2019, Uniper sold a gas volume of 220 bcm. The company is headquartered in Düsseldorf, being the third-largest listed German utility. Under its new strategy, Uniper aims to become carbon-neutral in Europe by 2035.

About Ruhr Oel GmbH – BP Gelsenkirchen
BP operates the two plants in Horst and Scholven in Gelsenkirchen as an integrated and complex refinery and petrochemical site with around 2,000 employees and 170 trainees. The processing capacity is approximately twelve million tonnes of crude oil per year. In addition to gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and heating oil, this produces more than 50 different products, primarily for the chemical industry.