Black liquor to black gold
Feb 17th, 2009 by Richard
Last December, Sweden’s Chemrec raised $20 million to advance their gasification technology that turns a byproduct from paper and pulp mills into biofuels and biochemicals. The Series C round was led by Environmental Technologies Fund, and included existing investors — the Volvo Technology Transfer Fund among them.
Pulp and paper mills produce a dark, inky byproduct known in the industry as black liquor, which is often burned to produce modest amounts of electricity and plant stream. Chemrec says its new process can turn the black liquor into syn gas and from there into a biofuel or biochemicals. The company claims that process is more efficient than producing electricity with a traditional boiler system. The technology is currently being used at two mills — Weyerhaeuser’s New Bern mill in North Carolina, and Chemrec’s own development plant in Pitea, Sweden. The company is working with leading pulp and paper mills in the US and Sweden to implement the technology commercially.
Volvo, in particular, is interested in turning black liquor into bio dimethyl ether, or DME, because the company has been developing 14 prototype trucks to run on DME. The Swedish Bioenergy Association has suggested that if a DME plant was operating at every Swedish pulp and paper mill, enough biofuel could be made to replace a third of the country’s diesel fuel.
Globally, this technology could meet 2 percent of the world’s demand for gasoline and diesel, thereby reducing carbon emissions by more than 100 million metric tons annually.
