Displaying items by tag: Sweden

Sweden: Cementa plans to increase the share of bio-based alternative fuel (AF) in its Slite, Gotland, cement plant’s fuel mix. The move forms part of the plant’s plan to achieve climate positive cement production from 2030.

Parent company HeidelbergCement’s Northern Europe general manager Giv Brantenberg said “As we capture and store CO₂ from the cement production, including emissions from bioenergy, we will be able to manufacture carbon-free cement for the Swedish construction industry.”

Sweden: Norway-based Geminor received a batch of refuse-derived fuel (RDF) produced at its Braunsbedra plant in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany for use at Scandinavian cement plants on 23 April 2020. The shipment was Europe’s first international shipment of RDF by rail, without the use of trucks. Geminor plans for the 110t delivery to be the first of many on the 50,000t-capacity line. Geminor CEO Kjetil Vikingstad said, “Since transport by ship is only effective within a radius of 200km from a port, central Germany becomes a natural starting point for
transport by train. This is the beginning of extensive waste transport by train in
Europe.”

UK: Refuse-derived fuel (RDF) exports from England to decline by 13% to Europe fell by 13.4% year-on-year to 2.71Mt in 2019 from 3.09Mt in 2018. Waste recovery company Germinor reported the results of the survey from Footprint Services, which uses UK Environment Agency data. However, the report also said that exports of solid-recovered fuel (SRF) grew by 4%.

According to the Environment Agency data, the Netherlands remains the biggest importer of English waste-derived fuels (RDF and SRF), with 1.16Mt and 43% of the market in 2019. Sweden is the second biggest offtaker nation with 0.6Mt, followed by Germany at 0.4Mt and Denmark at 0.14Mt and Norway at 0.14Mt.

Geminor said that it led the list of waste-derived fuels exporters in 2019 with 0.31Mt in 2019. Biffa Waste Services was the second biggest exporter, followed by SUEZ UK and N&P Alternative Fuels.

Its UK country manager James Maiden said that 2019 was a challenging market for UK export, mostly due to issues surrounding Brexit, the Dutch temporary import restrictions and an increase in UK domestic capacity and facilities. He expected these conditions to continue into 2020, where the Dutch and Swedish tax announcements will impact on UK flows. Maiden said that the English export market is decreasing but that Geminor was balanced this with additional export volumes transported from Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and internal UK flows.

Sweden: Geminor has been granted permission to operate freight by rail to and from its unit at Landskrona following a three-year application period. The plant processes more than 40,000t/yr of solid-recovered fuel (SRF), refuse-derived fuel (RDF) and waste wood

“We still have a long way to go in relation to transporting waste on rails in Europe,” said Country Manager Sweden at Geminor, Per Mernelius. He added that rail transport is still a ‘novelty’ in the waste processing industry with potential in the future.

UK/Ireland: Geminor says it has been engaged in a partnership with MSC transporting refuse-derived fuel (RDF) and solid-recovered fuel (SRF) from the UK and Ireland since February 2019. The first shipments were transported from Barking and Nottingham, UK to Aalborg, Denmark. This will be followed up by container shipments from Birmingham, UK to Habberstad, Sweden and Dublin, Ireland to Greece. The shipments are based on so-called ‘backload,’ where empty containers are used to reduce the price.

“Moving waste from the UK to Scandinavia can also be completed with trailers, but we will continue to use containers where this is the best option. Currently we are moving containers with RDF and SRF from Dublin to Greece and Spain, where container shipment is a more efficient way of transport,” said Oliver Caunce, Senior Account Manager at Geminor UK.

Sweden: HC Miljö has extended its contract to source Icopower pellets from Renewi. The contract will run for the next three years, with an extension possibility for a similar period. Renewi will supply the subsidiary of HeidelbergCement with up to 54,000t/yr of pellets.

“We are very proud that the contract with HeidelbergCement has been extended. We have been working together for many years, proving that an innovative product made from waste can have a significant contribution to a more sustainable world using it as fuel in an industrial process with a large energy demand. It perfectly fits our ‘waste no more’ vision,” said Michael van Hulst, Regional Director of Renewi’s Commercial Netherlands Division.

Renewi manufactures its Icopower pellet product in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and then ships them to Gotland in Sweden. The pellets are made by processing dry commercial waste.

UK: Sweden’s Metso has signed a service partner agreement for its M&J waste recycling equipment with Core Industrial Solutions. The deal will allow Metso to improve the availability of its services to the waste recycling industry. It has over 100 waste recycling machines in the UK.

"Complemented by Core Industrial Solutions' expertise and commitment, our services will enable maximised plant and operational efficiency with continuous maintenance," said Jens Peter Martensen, General Sales Manager, Metso Waste Recycling at Metso. Metso has also strengthened its overall setup and customer service in the UK and Ireland, by increasing sales personnel amongst other measures, to respond to growing customer needs.

Poland: Sweden’s NextFuel AB plans to launch NextFuel, a briquette fuel made from elephant grass, at the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP24) taking place in Katowice. The company says that its product is cheaper than and oil and coal in most markets and could be used to replace some or all of the coal normally used by a cement plant, coal plant or a steel plant. Its first operational plant is based in Austria.

The first NextFuel project is expected to reduce the CO₂ footprint of a cement factory in East Africa by 105% compared to the coal it is using at present. The cement plant also expects to cut its energy costs in half by using NextFuel instead of coal imported from South Africa. It will be able to grow Elephant Grass, the source of the fuel, next to the plant to reduce its fuel transportation costs.

Elephant Grass is a perennial tropical plant that can produce several crops in a year. Once the grass has been harvested, NextFuel says its technology requires ‘very little’ energy to produce a briquette. The company asserts that due to a quick carbon cycle and the storage of carbon, less CO₂ is released into the atmosphere when the fuel is burned than was captured from the atmosphere a few months earlier when the grass was growing. NextFuel says that annually the carbon cycle becomes negative.

After the grass is harvested, it is dried and fed into a patented reactor. This is a rotary drum, indirectly heated and operated with a low oxygen atmosphere. While inside that drum, volatile elements are separated from the grass, and the physical properties together with the energy content are transformed in less than 30 minutes. The reactor also drives out the off-gases from the grass. They are used as surplus energy to produce heat or electricity to power the facility. After the reactor is finished, the fuel is densified and turned into briquettes that are cooled. These briquettes are ready to use directly as a CO₂ negative fossil fuel substitute both in industrial and electricity production.

NextFuel plans to scale by licensing its technology to companies all around the world.

Sweden/UK: Siwertell, part of Cargotec, has signed a contract with the Spanish-Korean consortium, TR-Samsung, for a Siwertell ship unloader to support a new biomass-fuelled power plant under construction in Teeside, Middlesbrough in the UK.

"We provided extensive references demonstrating our ability to meet the owner's high standards and design criteria," said Peter Goransson, Siwertell Sales Manager & Senior Advisor. "Important factors included compliance with environmental directives, a proven track record of good reliability and safety, high through-vessel discharge rates and the ability to handle sensitive products with minimal cargo degradation or breakages."

Siwertell will deliver a customised rail-mounted ST 790-type D Siwertell unloader, which will be located close to the 299MW plant in Teesport. It will discharge wood pellets and wood chips to a matched Siwertell jetty conveyor with a movable transfer trolley, supplied as part of the contract. Siwertell biomass unloaders are also equipped with a new-generation safety system to mitigate the risks of fire and dust explosion when handling biomass in an enclosed space.

The unloader has a rated average capacity of 1200t/hr and a maximum rate of 1320t/hr, designed to meet the plant's requirements of 16,000t/day. It is equipped with a dual truck loading system for continuous direct truck loading at a rate of 300t/hr. This is a redundancy feature that allows operations to continue if the shore conveying system fails.

The unloader will be built in Europe by Siwertell's production partners and will be delivered fully assembled in 2018.

Sweden: N+P has signed a five-year contract to supply HC Miljö, a subsidiary of Heidelberg Cement, with Subcoal pellets. HC Miljö will supply Subcoal pellets to a number of cement kilns in northern Europe. The Subcoal will be used as an alternative fuel.

Subcoal will initially be supplied from N+P’s production site Subcoal Production FRM in the Netherlands. The site uses the Subcoal process to convert various industrial wastes into an alternative fuel. The process is focussed on using non-recyclable paper-plastic waste fractions, mainly sourced from the Netherlands, the UK and Germany.