VTT proposes a new small-scale gasification-based solution to produce fuels and chemicals from forest wastes

Type of post: NEWS IN BRIEF.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd has developed a new solution to produce transport fuels and chemicals from forest industry by-products (such as bark, sawdust and forestry waste) in a sustainable way. This new approach uses gasification to turn biomass into intermediate products (liquid hydrocarbons, methanol or methane) in units integrated with communal district heating plants or forest industry power plants. The intermediate products are processed further in oil refineries to make renewable fuels or chemicals.

Press release: “VTT develops a new sustainable way to turn forestry waste into transport fuels and chemicals”, 15/1/2019.

VTT developed and piloted the new gasification process and evaluated the competitiveness of plants based on the technique in the course of a recently concluded project called BTL2030 (part of the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment's transport biofuels development programme).

Figure 1. The development of gasification technology takes place in VTT's Bioruukki piloting centre in Espoo (taken from the press release)

Key points:

- The use of forest industry by-products does not impact on the carbon sink effect of forests. And, they do not compete against forest industry raw material procurement or food production.

- The process is based on VTT's low-pressure, low-temperature steam gasification technology, simplified gas purification and small-scale industrial syntheses.

- The distributed generation process makes efficient use of the energy content of biomass (55% of the energy content is turned into transport fuels and a further 20–25% can be used to provide district heating or to produce steam for industrial processes).

- The new technique reduces carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 90% compared to fossil fuels.

- The production costs of transport fuels made from domestic waste would amount to 0.8–1 € per litre of petrol or diesel. The new technology is set to become considerably more competitive as the costs of the raw materials of competing technologies increase and the process is expected to be highly competitive at least from the year 2030 onwards.
- The small-scale approach of the solution makes it easier to secure funding for building the first plant based on the new technology. Finland's previous plans have involved considerably larger gasification-based diesel plants, the raw material demands of which could not have been satisfied with locally sourced waste.