At the groundbreaking ceremony on April 4, 2025, the starting signal for the construction of one of the first carbon capture and use (CO2 separation) facilities in the industrial scale in Austria was officially given. The Merschl family family shows how to do it.
125 years of tradition in vegetable growing and now the climate goals for 2040 already realized
The Merschl family has been a vegetable grid with high innovation potential for more than 125 years. On 86,000 m² greenhouse area, approximately 3,000 tons of paradeiser are harvested and sold via “LGV gardener vegetables”. The Merschl family thus contributes to a significant contribution to the security of supply of the city of Vienna and Austria with fresh vegetables. Resource conservation, climate protection as well as fabric and waste management stood and stand here in the top priority and are supported by the sustainability program of the Vienna Agriculture Chamber. The Merschl family is now taking the decisive step into the future with their 14 million euro investment.
The technical implementation: an exemplary innovation
The Merschl family offer stable temperatures all year round. So far, the indoor climate has been secured conventionally with gas. The new system is a heat generation based on wood chips with a connected highly innovative system for separating the CO2, the actual carbon capture system. In his speech, the specialist planner Bernhard Russeold von Pe Solutions emphasized the complexity: “That is why we chose a 5 MW biomass boiler from Herzbinder, which was able to guarantee the best performance data for the very complex requirements.” And Arie van der Meulen, CTO of Green Gas & Liquids (Netherlands) added: “Our carbon capture system, which is tested, is environmentally friendly, economically effective and makes the Merschl family generated independently of Fossil CO2, which reduces the footprint and which significantly supports the growth of the paradise.”
Unique selling point and best practice template for Austrian climate protection
So the CO2 is not saved here, as with CCS systems (carbon capture and store), but goes into a re -use: the CO2 is blown into the greenhouses via your own lines, absorbed by the plants and thus promotes its growth. The negative CO2 becomes a resource – a milestone!
That is the unique selling point of this system: circular economy par excellence, because several circuits are optimized here: the CO2 circulation, the heating circuit, the plant growth circuit and also the money cycle for more domestic added value.
Incentives in politics and entrepreneurial spirit work together
In addition to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Merschl family, the regulatory framework and the financial incentives of politics are the decisive driver of being able to implement such projects at all.
Jürgen Schneider, Head of the Climate Section in the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Climate and Environmental Protection, Regions and Water Management, was pleased: “Preliminary projects such as this show how transformation can be achieved and ecological measures can be implemented in practice; climate protection and economy also successfully handle hand.”
Bernd Vogl, managing director of the Austrian climate and energy fund added: “The domestic economy faces enormous challenges. Companies like Merschl Gartenbau show that green investments are the right answer.
Customers benefit in the supermarkets
Last but not least, it is the end customers of the large trading houses that benefit from the investment of the Merschl family family: the supply chain and ecological quality of the food are transparent and understandable here. With the final words of the moderator Wolfgang Horn “In this size and refinement depth, this project is unique in Austria!” The event ended.
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The “Transformation of the Economy” program is a program of the climate and energy fund, endowed with funds from the construction and resilience factility of the rebuilding of Nextgeneration of the European Union.
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