A WORLD of BIOENERGY Elmia World Bioenergy 2008 in Sweden was like Disneyland for those in the biomass sector, covering everything from larger-scale industrial power to domestic pellet delivery and use. Big, small – It had it all. By Scott Jamieson go right to the road, loud and proud. And with the cuts come piles of biomass, either neatly piled slash, covered with a special paper wrap and drying to maximize the energy value, or less neatly piled stumps, torn from the ground with a growing array of special attachments, and heaped in a pile to dry and make the separation of dirt and sand easier. It’s a nation of forest biomass. Just the production and market for one YOU product – wood pellets – tells the story. It surprises many people that the US is in fact the world’s largest consumer of wood pellets for small- and medium-scale uses, with an annual consumption of 1.1 million tonnes, according to the Austrian lobby group ProPellets. Yet this growing market still only uses between 3 and 4 kg of pellets per capita per year. In compari- son, Sweden uses over 800,000 tonnes per year for large-scale industrial use, and another 800,000 tonnes for small- and medium-scale use, for a total of 1.6 million tonnes per year. That’s a whopping 65 kg of pellets per capita per year for residential heating alone! Some 130,000 tonnes of that comes from Canada, by the way. According to the Swedish Bioenergy Association (Svebio), over 25% of Sweden’s energy mix comes from biofuels, and much of that forest-based. The nation’s goal is to be independent of fossil fuels by 2020, so look to this relatively small nation to lead the way in the coming decade in both tech- nology and application. Just across the Baltic in Finland the story is similar. Finland’s bioenergy association FinBio reports that bioenergy makes up over 25% of the nation’s energy mix, with wood again playing a key role. So it’s no surprise that the world’s premiere bioenergy event, Elmia World LEFT MAIN: The BooForssjo sawmill uses sawdust from its own operation as well as from other mills to feed its pellet mill, which supplies domestic retail markets in both bulk home and bag delivery. INSET: The mixed feed at Ena Energi is scraped onto the final infeed conveyor. CanadianBIOMASS 25 can’t spend more than an hour driving through southern and western Sweden without noticing this country’s dependence on biomass and bioenergy. It’s everywhere, and in part that’s because forestry is everywhere. There’s no hiding the working forest behind roadside buffers here, as cuts
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