Siemens 2008 Annual Report Download - page 22

16 At a glance – Our innovators and innovations
Chad Felch
Rothschild, Wisconsin, U.S.
Martin Teichmann
Graz, Austria
Turning waste into a resource
A process for extracting high-grade crude oil from oil sands and tar sands has made Canada one
of the world’s major oil-producing countries. Unfortunately, this technology has some undesirable
consequences: the gasication of oil sands – one part of the upgrading process in which heavy
bitumen from the sands is converted into high-grade crude oil – is a viscous sludge of soot parti-
cles. Tackling this problem, Siemens chemist Chad Felch developed a process that converts 90 per-
cent of the particles into carbon dioxide. The Wisconsin native also determined that certain heavy
metals found in the sludge can be used as catalysts to enhance the oxidation process – effectively
turning hazardous waste into a valuable resource. At the core of Felch’s innovation is the process
of wet-air oxidation, originally used to treat sewage sludge and heavily polluted industrial waste-
water. The inventive researcher optimized this process for the new application.
Pioneers in environmental protection
Innovation has always been a top priority at Siemens. That’s why we
invested about €3.8 billion in R&D in scal 2008 alone. And that invest-
ment has paid off: our 32,300 researchers, working at 150 R&D centers
around the world, submitted 8,200 invention reports during the year.
We honor our best innovators with Inventor of the Year awards for out-
standing patents and with Top Innovator awards for promising technolo-
gies that have been transformed into marketable products.