Bio-Based Gasoline Project - Bioisooctane from residues of the Swedish forestry

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More news related to the forest sector in Northern Europe. In April this year, a Swedish consortium announced having entered into a collaboration to develop a gasoline fuel based entirely on forest resources with support from the Swedish Energy Agency under the “Bio-Based Gasoline Project”. The consortium is constituted by three important companies from the Nordic country: Preem, SEKAB and Sveaskog. Sweden has 30 million hectares of forest land and this natural wealth can be used to obtained sustainable chemicals and fuels. In this sense, the purpose of the project is implement state-of-the-art technological solutions to produce high performance fuels rom residuals of the Swedish forestry.

And now, Global Bionergies joins the project by signing a collaboration agreement with the three Swedish companies to carry out a conceptual scope study for a plant that would produce the biogasoline (see the press release). Over the coming months, the consortium will study various plant scenarios to profitably convert forestry products and residues into bioisooctane, a 100-octane rating, high-performance biobased gasoline derived from bioisobutene. The cooperative project will run during the years 2016 and 2017.

Figure 1. Biorefinery Demo Plant of SEKAB (extracted from SEKAB web page)

The partners’ activities will cover the whole value chain:
  • Sveaskog: foresty activities. The company owns and manages a 14% of the 30 million hectares aforementioned. The value chain developed is of particular interest for Sveaskog as it can suppose new uses for forest by-products.
  • SEKAB: biomass to sugar conversion process. The “Bio-Based Gasoline Project” will enable the large scale commercial deployment of CelluAPP® wood-conversion technology. This technology has been developed and verified in an industrial test environment (the Biorefinery Demo Plant) in close proximity to SEKAB’s production facility in Örnsköldsvik and has been in operation since 2004.
  • Global Bioenergies: wood-sugars to isobutene process. Following its first plant project in France based on sugar from beet, they will adapt its process for wood-sugars.
  • Preem: gasoline production processes, blending and retailing activities. The ability to produce drop-in, high performance biobased gasoline in Sweden from residuals of the forestry is a central brick in their strategy.

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