Engineer Kurt Thomas Pörner founded "Technisches Büro Pörner" (transl. Pörner Technical Office) in Vienna in 1972, focusing on industrial piping. With his team of around 15 engineers, Pörner carried out the detail engineering of a refinery in Congo from start to finish. In its early years, the young company worked on challenging projects for refineries in Congo and Mauritania. These projects helped the small business achieve tremendous economic growth.

The Pörner engineering company expanded in 1975 with an office in Linz and converted into a limited liability company in 1979. The company gradually expanded its areas of expertise to include process engineering, apparatus and machinery, electrical engineering/instrumentation, as well as steel and civil engineering, along with piping construction. These services were offered from three locations in Vienna, Linz, and Kundl/Tyrol. This enabled Pörner, a flexible, medium-sized engineering company, to plan and implement complete plants for its customers “from a single source”.

In the 1980s, Pörner invested in the international marketing of a novel oxidation process developed by OMV for producing high-quality bitumen in refineries. We granted the first Biturox® license to Mobil Wörth in Germany in 1978. Pörner is continuously optimizing this process.

Today, Pörner is the global market leader in bitumen oxidation technology. To date, more than 60 Biturox® plants have been licensed and built worldwide.

During the 1990s, Pörner pioneered several major environmental projects, including waste incineration and sewage treatment plant optimization. In 1991, the technical expertise of Pörner's engineers was recognized with the highest award for engineering companies. Pörner received the Austrian State Prize for Consulting for its work on the general planning of an integrated wastewater treatment plant with an evaporation system, a fluidized bed boiler, and a power plant in Funder, St. Veit an der Glan.

The German Pörner location in Grimma, Saxony, was founded, marking another step toward expansion for Pörner. With a fully integrated engineering office set up in record time and organized similarly to the parent company in Vienna, Pörner was able to serve the chemical and process engineering industry with comprehensive engineering services during the boom period after German reunification.

In 2003, Pörner acquired Leipzig-based EDL Anlagenbau GmbH, with around 130 engineers and specialists, from RWE Solutions, thereby increasing its process expertise and almost doubling its project management capacity in refinery, petrochemical, and chemical plant construction. As a result, EDL positioned itself as a medium-sized plant engineering company for leading industrial customers throughout Germany and beyond.

That year, AGRANA Bioethanol GmbH commissioned the Pörner Group to build a bioethanol production plant in Pischelsdorf, Lower Austria. With a total investment of €125 million, the plant was the largest in Austria at the time and the largest project in Pörner's history. Pörner won the 2007 State Prize for Consulting in the "Engineering Consulting" category for this project. Since then, the commitment to sustainability and the "green economy" has steadily intensified.

In 2016, the Pörner Group commissions its own pilot plant for the production of bio-silicates from rice hull ash in Freiberg. This marks an important milestone for the “green” technology-oriented plant engineering to which the Pörner Group is committed. With now five pilot plants of our own (Biturox®, bio-silicates, dewaxing/de-oiling, and solvent extraction), we are continuously working on further developing our technologies in close cooperation with our customers.

To offer customers an even more diverse range of services, the Pörner Group is expanding its portfolio to include water treatment plant engineering. In March 2020, the new “Pörner Water” team, who had previously worked for Siemens, was integrated into the Pörner Group. The Pörner Water competence center covers industrial water treatment, including concept studies, complete project implementation, predictive maintenance, and servicing in all industrial sectors.

Process plant engineering is the supreme engineering discipline, and we have mastered it for 50 years. We have helped shape the world by providing engineering and process technology expertise.

Thermische Apparate Freiberg GmbH (TAF) become a fully integrated subsidiary of the Pörner Group in April 2022. Through this acquisition, the Pörner Group expands its comprehensive plant engineering portfolio to include in-house production of critical process equipment and customized pilot and research plants.

As an independent, owner-managed engineering company, we have embodied engineering excellence in process plant engineering for 53 years. The group employs around 550 people in the field of complete plant engineering at 10 locations in Europe. With a capacity of over 750,000 working hours per year, the Pörner Group is operating at full capacity.