Within one week, SPIN member Synhelion has announced two commercial-scale projects. On 1 September 2026, the Swiss solar-fuel company engaged Saipem to deliver pre-FEED engineering for a 30,000-tonne-per-year synthetic fuel plant at RWE’s Hürth-Knapsack site in Germany. On 8 September, it followed up with a memorandum of understanding with the Moroccan government for a 100,000-tonne-per-year plant in the province of Tan-Tan, with the land already reserved. For a company that commissioned its first industrial-scale plant, DAWN, in Jülich only two years ago, that is a jump of three orders of magnitude in planned capacity.
Headline numbers are easy to quote. The more interesting question is what these two announcements, taken together, tell us about where Power-to-Liquid scale-up actually stands, and why a Swiss company is building its commercial future in the Rhineland and the Sahara rather than at home.
Germany first: pre-FEED, the unglamorous phase that decides whether a plant gets built
Pre-FEED, short for pre-front-end engineering design, is the stage before the detailed engineering that leads to a final investment decision. It is where a concept becomes a configuration: which process units, in which sequence, with which utilities, at which site, and at what cost. Nobody cuts a ribbon at the end of a pre-FEED. But no bank finances a plant without one.
Saipem’s task, according to Synhelion, is to advance the engineering, refine the technical configuration, define the utility requirements and integrate Synhelion’s proprietary fuel technology with the downstream synthesis and upgrading steps that turn syngas into finished, RED-compliant fuels. The plant is designed for 30,000 tonnes of renewable synthetic fuels per year, with Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) as the main product and renewable synthetic diesel and gasoline for shipping and road transport alongside it. Co-CEO and co-founder Philipp Furler describes the goal as “a robust engineering basis for one of our commercial-scale plants” and adds that “scaling our technology is key to making renewable fuels commercially competitive.”
That last sentence deserves a moment. In May, Synhelion published a cost trajectory validated by DNV that puts solar fuels below EUR 1,000 per tonne at scale (we covered it here). Every cost curve of that kind rests on an assumption about plant size. Hürth is the first step toward the size at which those numbers are supposed to hold; Morocco is the second.
Why Saipem
Saipem is one of the large Italian engineering, procurement and construction groups with a long history in refineries, gas processing and offshore infrastructure. It is not a Power-to-X start-up and has no need to prove that a novel reactor works. What it brings is the opposite: decades of experience in building large chemical plants that run reliably for thirty years, and a name that lenders and insurers recognise.
This is the pattern we are seeing across the sector. Technology developers who have de-risked their core process now hand the balance of plant to established EPC contractors. For a young company, that is not a loss of control; it is the price of admission to project finance. A plant with a credible engineering partner and a credible site host is a plant that can be bankable, and bankability is exactly what Synhelion’s recently funded Jülich demonstration plant is meant to establish.
Why Hürth-Knapsack
The site choice is at least as telling as the partner choice. Knapsacker Hügel is an established chemical and energy location in Hürth near Cologne, in the heart of the Rhenish lignite mining area that Germany is winding down. RWE, the site owner, offers what a greenfield site never can: existing pipelines and utilities, permitting support and a host that knows how to develop industrial land.
For a synthetic fuel plant, that matters more than it might seem. The exotic part of the process, Synhelion’s high-temperature reactor, is only one block in a long chain. The rest is syngas conditioning, Fischer-Tropsch or comparable synthesis, upgrading, storage, product handling and logistics. All of that is easier, faster and cheaper inside an existing industrial park than in a field. The location also ties in with Synhelion’s growing footprint in North Rhine-Westphalia, where DAWN operates and where the next plant in Jülich has just secured public support from a programme financed by the EU’s Just Transition Fund.
There is a regional-policy story here as well. A region built on lignite is trying to attract the industries that replace it. A 30,000-tonne synthetic fuel plant is the kind of anchor project such a transition needs, and it signals to the regional grid, hydrogen and CO₂ infrastructure planners that there will be a customer.
Then Morocco: 100,000 tonnes where the sun actually is
The second announcement is of a different kind and a different size. Synhelion has signed a memorandum of understanding with Morocco’s Ministry of Industry and Trade, its Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, its Ministry of Investment, Convergence and Evaluation of Public Policies, and AMDIE, the national investment and export development agency. The subject is a plant with a planned capacity of 100,000 tonnes of renewable fuel per year in the province of Tan-Tan in the Guelmim-Oued Noun region on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, south of Agadir. Land has been reserved, and Synhelion has set up a Moroccan branch with Casablanca Finance City status.
Co-CEO and co-founder Gianluca Ambrosetti gives the reason in one sentence: “Morocco’s exceptional renewable energy resources and its clear industrial strategy make it an ideal location for scaling our synthetic fuel technology.” Both halves of that sentence matter. Synhelion’s core process runs on high-temperature heat, and its DAWN plant produces that heat with a field of mirrors. Southern Morocco has some of the best direct solar irradiation in reach of European markets, plus strong and steady wind along the coast. Just as important, Morocco has spent years positioning itself as a supplier of green hydrogen and its derivatives to Europe, with an explicit industrial strategy and land allocation process for exactly this kind of project. A memorandum with four government bodies at once is what that strategy looks like from the investor’s side.
An MoU is not an investment decision, and Synhelion has given no timeline, cost or offtake details for Tan-Tan. But the sequencing is instructive. Hürth is close to customers, infrastructure and the regulatory framework that creates demand; Morocco is close to the cheap renewable energy that ultimately decides the cost per tonne. A company that wants to sell RED-compliant fuel into ReFuelEU quotas needs both, and Synhelion has now staked a claim in each.
The demand side: ReFuelEU does the pulling
Synhelion is explicit that its projects respond to demand created by EU regulation. Under ReFuelEU Aviation, fuel suppliers at EU airports have had to blend 2 percent SAF since 2025, rising to 6 percent in 2030 and 20 percent in 2035, with a dedicated sub-quota for synthetic aviation fuels that starts in 2030 with 0,8 percent and reaches 5 percent by 2035. The 2030 sub-quota may look small in percentage terms, but it translates into hundreds of thousands of tonnes of e-SAF per year for which there is, today, almost no production capacity in Europe. A single 100,000-tonne plant in Morocco would cover a noticeable share of it.
This is the mechanism that turns pilot plants into commercial ones. A binding quota with a defined ramp gives airlines a reason to sign long-term offtake agreements, offtake agreements give developers a revenue line, and a revenue line is what an EPC contractor, a host government and a bank can work with. Synhelion has already said that the majority of the Jülich plant’s output is covered by binding offtake contracts. Hürth and Tan-Tan are the next rungs on the same ladder.
What we do not know yet
Both announcements leave questions open, and it is worth naming them rather than glossing over them. For Hürth, the press release does not specify the energy source. Synhelion’s DAWN plant uses concentrated solar heat to drive its thermochemical reactor, and Hürth is not a location anyone would pick for its sunshine, so the commercial plant presumably relies on another renewable heat and electricity supply, but the company has not said so publicly. There is no timeline for FEED, final investment decision or start of operations, no cost figure, and no description of the CO₂ source or the hydrogen supply chain. For Morocco, the open list is longer still: energy configuration, CO₂ source, water supply in an arid coastal region, export logistics and, above all, financing.
None of this is a criticism. It is what pre-FEED announcements and memoranda of understanding look like. The point of the next twelve to twenty-four months is precisely to answer those questions with numbers.
The view from Switzerland
Synhelion is a Swiss company, a spin-off from ETH Zurich and one of the most visible members of the Swiss Power-to-X community. Its research, its early demonstrations and a good part of its team are here. Its first industrial plant, its next demonstration plant, its first commercial-scale plant and now its first plant in the 100,000-tonne class are in Germany and Morocco.
That is not a coincidence, and in Germany’s case it is not about sunshine or land at all. It is about the framework. Germany and the EU have a binding quota, a sub-quota for synthetic fuels, a definition of RED-compliant fuel that investors can plan against, public co-funding for first-of-a-kind plants and industrial hosts that actively court such projects. Morocco adds cheap renewable energy and a government that signs memoranda with four ministries and agencies in one go. Switzerland has aligned its SAF blending obligation with ReFuelEU under the revised CO₂ Act, which is welcome. But the ordinances beneath the laws still lag behind: SPIN’s position paper from July lists 42 regulatory blockages that stand between the legal intent and an actual investment decision, from missing customs tariff numbers for synthetic fuels to a mineral oil tax that is still charged in full on renewable jet fuel that should be exempt.
Nobody expects a 100,000-tonne solar fuel plant on the Swiss plateau. But the engineering, the project development, the finance and the offtake contracts for such plants can be based anywhere, and today they are being built up in Zurich. Whether they stay there depends on whether Switzerland treats its Power-to-X companies as an industry to keep or as a research success to wave goodbye to. Synhelion’s week shows what happens when the framework works: an EPC contractor is hired, a site host commits, a government reserves land. We should be pleased that a Swiss technology is reaching commercial scale. We should also ask what it would take for the next announcement to have a Swiss dateline.
Sources: Synhelion press releases of 1 September 2026 and 8 September 2026.
🤖 AI transparency: This text and its visual were created using AI, reviewed and approved by a human.
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