Sweden 'could power domestic flights' with forest product biofuels

Domestic air travel in Sweden could be powered by biofuels produced from the country’s plentiful forest residues rather than regular jet fuel, amid claims of a breakthrough in new research published this week.

Progress on making crop-based residues viable for advanced 'second-generation' biofuels used in aviation would be a huge boon for the sector in view of doubts from crop-based 'first generation' biofuels producers that commercial production of advanced biofuels will be possible on a sufficient scale.  

The results of the study show that biomass gasification, combined with a liquefaction process known as Fischer Tropsch synthesis, can be used to competitively and sustainably produce aviation biofuels from forest residues.

“We have found a solution where the fuel used for Swedish domestic flights today can be replaced by biofuel produced from Swedish forestry raw materials in the near future,” said said Fredrik Granberg, project manager at Luleå University of Technology’s energy engineering department.  

He added: “We know that there are production technologies that work and we know that the Swedish forest industry can potentially supply forest residues in large quantities.”

The energy efficiency of biofuel production is about 40% for the two most promising raw materials, branches and tops and 'black liquor' (a waste product from wood processing) the study found.

As a next step, researchers urgently want a demonstration pilot plant built because of the likely 5-10 year delay before a large-scale facility for commercial production can be attempted, Granberg said.

Forest residues in Sweden could potentially fuel international flights operating out of Sweden as well as domestic ones, the researcher added.

Targets

Sweden’s high blending mandates and relatively ambitious GHG targets makes the country one of the EU’s biggest consumers of biodiesel (around 1 billion litres a year), and in particular hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO), much of which is supplied by Neste in neighbouring Finland.

Sweden already uses a small amount of pine residue and pine oil as a feedstock for biodiesel, according to USDA GAIN’s 2017 Biofuels Annual, but this is just a tiny fraction of what is consumed by the road transport and aviation sectors.

Wood or its by-products supply 20,000 cubic metres of ethanol (20 million litres) in Sweden, according to the Swedish Bioenergy Association.

Around 20 MW of synthetic natural gas (SNG) is generated from wood that is used for biogas transport.