Basically Chemrec is using Haldor Topsøe technology in converting black liquor to BioDME and Biomethanol in the far north of Sweden. I took this illustration from their brochure. It looks nice, I'm going to see if the graphics are more than just good marketing. How much black liquor do you actually get from one hectare?
Some of the questions that I would have liked to ask are: how much black liquor is there actually around? Do you need any modifications to trucks and infrastructure in order to run on DME?
I managed to get hold of COO Jonas Rudberg from Chemrec on the phone the other day. It turns out that what Chemrec refers to as black liquor is actually the waste fraction from cellulosis manufacture consisting of lignine and hemicellulosis and chemicals, this is all good biological stuff (50% of input into a pulp plant) so the yield per hectare should be OK.
ReplyDeleteIt also turns out that DME is a gas at 1 bar, so infrastructure needs to operate under pressure, which complicates and makes things more expensive.
Thumbs up for trying new things out, and spending some of that Swedish tax money, 55 M€ in an exiting way.
End of May one of the partners in the project, Domsjö Fabriker, a pulp manufacturer decided to pull out of the project.