The Swedish Road Administration has established a prize aimed at stimulating and increasing interest in environmental work in the field of road transportation. The theme has been traffic and social planning to reduce climate impacts. The research programme Black Liquor Gasification, which is co-financed by Mistra and the Swedish Energy Agency, developed the technology behind this environmental prize. "Those of us working in the Black Liquor Gasification programme have had the benefit of participating in an important technological development during its most intensive and creative phase," says Rikard Gebart, Director of the programme. Ingvar Landälv, Technical Director and Chemrec, agrees. “If everything goes as planned, we will soon experience a large commercial breakthrough for bio-refineries, where black liquor gasification will be one of the key technologies," he says.
Boiling wood chips
Thousands of tonnes of black liquor are produced daily in pulp and paper factories, as a by-product from boiling wood chips. The black liquor contains large quantities of energy and is commonly combusted to produce steam and electricity, and for recovering chemicals from the boiling process. But when black liquor is gasified performance efficiency improves, and therein lies the possibility of producing sustainable liquid fuels, such as dimethyl ether (DME) and methanol, or increasing the production of green electricity.
The research programme has been doing this successfully since 2004. A demonstration plant in Piteå has proven that the technology is robust and ready for scaling up. It is these results that have made it possible to plan plants that are 25 times larger, for fuel production in Sweden and the United States.
Common goals
“The black liquor gasification programme is a good example of how research and the private sector can collaborate toward common goals. There are many of us behind this work, from academia, industry, institutes and research funding organizations. If we fully succeed, Sweden will take its place in the lead," says Britt Marie Bertilsson, Technology Programmes Director at Mistra.
“The Swedish Road Administration´s prize shows that our work has attracted attention, even outside the inner circle in the branch, and I am convinced that it has made ETC´s and Chemrec´s researchers and engineers feel a little bit extra proud when they go to work in the morning," says Rikard Gebart, Programme Director for Black Liquor Gasification.
Best company
According to the newspaper Dagens Industri, new risk capitalists are also investing avidly. Chemrec issued new shares worth 160 million Swedish Crowns in order to increase production of the vehicle fuel DME. The Environmental Technologies Fund (EFT) — one of Europe´s largest pure environmental technology funds — is one of the investors in the new stocks. Henrik Olsén at EFT said to the paper, “We have been searching globally for the absolute best company in each branch. Chemrec is a world-class firm working with a product that has enormous potential."
