The war against Putin and climate change (1): Replacing dirty coal with a clean fuel
Disruptive cleantech innovations will play a vital role in the parallel war against climate change and against Russia’s fossil grip on Europe. This is nr 1 of 4 articles about four Scandinavian start-ups that each introduce new solutions to different parts of the global challenge.
Disclaimer: The writer is also an an early-phase investor and board-member in the four companies.
Because of Russia cutting down export of gas to Europe, Germany and other European governments have been forced to make a u-turn and reopen coal power plants. This war-driven return to coal power, although not permanent, risk to undermine Europe’s climate commitments. The Scandinavian company NextFuel offers a solution that makes it attractive for power companies, steel and cement industries to replace dirty coal with biocoal from sustainable sources.
NextFuel brings to market a technology, developed in partnership with the Austrian engineering company Andritz, for efficient torrefaction of biomass.The biocoal briquettes produced by NextFuel's patented technology have an energy content equal to the fossil coal currently in use in process industries and 15 000 coal power plants worldwide. After a long period of proofing and fine-tuning, NextFuels first full-scale plant is now under construction in Joensuu in Finland. The Joensuu plant is a partnership with the Finnish energy investor Taaleri who will own and operate the biocoal plant that will fuel a combined heat and power (CHP) plant owned by the municipal energy company Savon Voima Oyj.
The first phase of the Taaleri/NextFuel project, expected to start production during 2023, will have a total production of about 60 000 tonnes of biocoal per year. Thereafter a second phase is foreseen, expanding with several new plants in Europe and North America. The facility will use by-products from the forest industry and forestry as raw material.
NextFuel and other biocoal technologies are important for Europe’s war against Putin, for several reasons. With the use of biocoal, Europe can replace electricity currently fuelled by natural gas from Russia and at the same time continue to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases. In addition, by converting to biocoal Europe will reduce its dependence on coal imported from Russia. In 2021, imports of hard coal from Russia – another source of revenues fuelling Russia’s aggression - stood for about 30 percent of all hard coal consumption in the EU.
Of course, Europe does not locally have enough biomass resources to replace all coal currently consumed on the continent. However, various studies have shown that Europe has a considerable potential without having to compete with food production, especially by converting abandoned agricultural land to the production of bioenergy or using locally marginal lands. High yielding perennial grasses such as Miscanthus and Switchgrass have been identified as promising candidates for bioenergy production on abandoned lands, biomass that with technologies such as NextFuel’s can be converted to high-value biocoal. 100 – 200 production lines for example, each with the capacity to produce about 100 000 tons of briquettes, would be sufficient to replace 5-10 % of Europe’s consumption of hard coal
On a global scale, the potential is many times more important. Countries and regions like Brazil, India and Sub-Saharan Africa have a considerable potential to plant tropical fast-growing species such as bagasse and elephant grass on non-agricultural marginal land. For these countries, converting fast-growing crops to biocoal represent an untapped potential for exports, as well as a cost-efficient route to replace domestic use of fossil coal.
Burning biocoal also causes CO2 emissions, but because the biomass that is used has already bound CO2 as part of the carbon cycle, we can consider biocoal as a renewable energy source. Furthermore, by using fast-growing crops as miscanthus as raw material, the carbon cycle can in certain cases be carbon negative on a yearly basis. This is because new carbon is being bound and stored in the ground for every cycle of crops throughout the year.
But how climate-efficient is it too convert land to energy crops for biocoal production, compared to using the same land for production of biofuel for road transport and aviation for example?
The answer is: It depends. But if you consider the necessity to prepare for sequestering of carbon, centralised use of biomass in industry and power production is clearly the most climate-friendly use of land resources. The reason is that it is much easier and cheaper to install carbon capture and storage technologies on a steel mill or a biomass power plant, than to try to capture the same amount of carbon from cars and airplanes for example. A seminal report from the Energy Transition Commission released last year – “Bioresources within a Net-Zero Emissions Economy” - concluded that carbon capture and storage at bioenergy plants (BECCS) could save c.5 GtCO2 per year, equal to as much as 16 % of the global energy-related CO2 emissions.
To reach this goal, the report emphasises the necessity to prioritise energy crops for bioenergy plants, instead of scaling up biofuel production for example:“Allocating biomass supply this way would make it essential to develop alternative decarbonisation solutions for other sectors – for instance synthetic fuel for aviation – with implications for the total zero carbon electricity requirement”
In other words, innovative biocoal technologies as developed by NextFuel is not only a weapon against Putin, it is also a technology needed to speed up the deployment of carbon-negative power production.
Photo: Nextfuel AB
