Cottbus University, a window on the world

“Founded in 1991, the university has 6,700 students, 1,000 of them foreign students from 90 different countries,” DrMarita Müller, director of public relations, tells us right away. At the time of the GDR, Cottbus was already home to an engineering university. After the reunification of Germany, the authorities decided to revitalise the campus.

“Today,” continues the director, “the concept that drives the university is very different. Its profile is quite unique, with a concentration on five key fields and the focus on research.” The five favoured fields are: the environment, energy, materials, construction, and information and communication technologies. The research projects are supervised by more than 100 university ‘presidents’.  

Out of Africa

The reputation of the Cottbus campus very soon spread beyond the national borders. A sign of the times, large numbers of students arrived from China. “231 of them enrolled for the 2009/2010 academic year,” says Marita Müller. These were followed by students from the Cameroon (90) and then Polish students (80), Indians (39) and… Nigerians (33). “At one time we even had a lot of students from Ghana. Today we have 16 Ghanaian students,” adds the director. A total of 15 African countries are represented at Cottbus. 

The icing on the cake is surely the superb glass library, the work of the architects Herzog and de Meuron (designers of the new Tate Gallery in London and of the Olympic Stadium in Beijing) where, for the past four years, students have been able to study until late in the evening. 

Marie-Martine Buckens

Betting on the 'Schwarze Pumpe'

In September 2008, the Swedish energy giant Vattenfall inaugurated the world’s first ‘CO2-free’ coal-fired power plant. A life-size pilot project made possible with the assistance of the Cottbus University of Technology, this is a world first. 

The prototype was built on the site of the 'Schwarze Pumpe' (Black Pump) 10 kilometres from Cottbus, in Spremberg, centre of lignite mining and processing. The group, which has bought up several German energy concerns, including the Black Pump, would like to improve the image of an industry synonymous with pollution. The pilot plant is located alongside the industrial plant and still fuelled with lignite but, thanks to a new combustion process known as ‘oxyfuel’, emits only C02. This is then captured, liquefied, and buried in a former underground reservoir in Altmark, 350 kilometres away in the Land of Saxony-Anhalt. While many ecologists criticise this new technology, describing it as a ‘smokescreen’ and arguing that it consumes twice as much coal per kilowatt produced, Vattenfall presents it as a response to the challenge of growing electricity demand in a country that decided to do away with nuclear energy by 2020.