Biomass energy made profitable
The principle problems that causes biomass energy to be non-competitive are associated with the reliability and performance of gas cleaning systems. And because energy production costs vary from one country to another, current biomass power plants are only viable in countries such as Denmark, Italy, Germany and Austria for example. Catalyst development centred on how to improve the tar decomposition gas cleaning systems, and this was achieved by replacing the existing gas reformers and filters with nickel monolith catalytic converters. This in turn led to the development of two catalytic tar decomposition processes. Having observed 2300 catalyst operations with real gas at optimal operation conditions, the power plants have demonstrated to be soot free and economically feasible in gasification processes. The economic feasibilities for competitive implementation in low cost energy countries were benchmarked against Finland because current biomass energy production can only exist in three cases. Firstly if the produced electricity can be consumed without selling it to the grid, secondly if production is subsidised, and thirdly if raw material is free or has to be sold rather than bought. These studies have resulted in a reduced sized power plant, a continuous operational system and the capability of gasifying various types of biomass without compromising the plants performance. Hence the estimated time period for a return on investment in Finland is now viable.
