“WaltrAut” officially in operation

With a total investment volume of over € 33,000,000, the WaltrAut is the largest investment at the Emlichheim site and shows the company’s strong commitment to the location. The roller drying plant with autoclave, nicknamed WaltrAut, was handed over to production and officially commissioned on 1 July 2022, after six months of continuous test production in a 24/7 shift operation.

“Residual measures are still being worked through by the engineering department. Also in the last weeks of the commissioning phase, new products were produced on the plant for the first time, which in turn brought new findings. Optimization on a production plant of this scale never stops,” says Florian Schmidt-Hickmann, project manager at the Emsland Group.

With a construction period of only 13 months during the Corona pandemic — including construction, assembly, piping, as well as electrical and automation work — WaltrAut is considered an organizational masterstroke by the entire project team. A working area of around 3,750 m² was created over five floors, which are each 750 m² in size. Over 13,000 tons of concrete and 1,000 tons of structural steel were used in the construction. By means of 6000 meters of piping and over 60,000 meters of cable, 100 self-selected individual machines were assembled like a jigsaw puzzle to form a fully comprehensive plant.

In the future, forward-looking products for technical applications will be produced here, for example for wallpaper paste, adhesive materials for products like gypsum and tiles, and flocculants for sewage treatment plants.

Each year, the starch from around 60,000 metric tons of potatoes will be processed into specialty products with WaltrAut. The steam required for production is obtained in a CO2-neutral manner from the neighboring waste wood and straw power plants.

The WaltrAut project is considered a kickoff to the Emsland Groups’s larger “Emvision 2030” investment plan.