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The Bio4Energy sister organisation, the Swedish Gasification Centre (SFC) launched last SFC logotype year, has its own web pages on the website of Luleå University of Technology (LTU) in northern Sweden. They have sections for News, Publications, Conferences and an entrance to an internal website for members of the SFC consortium, and more.

In an e-mail, SFC coordinator Rikard Gebart, who is a professor at LTU, said
that further news of research results, events and conferences would be added shortly.

A first couple of dates to note were a 14 May meeting for the members of Bio4Gasification, a strand of the SFC whose members, mainly biorefinery researchers, propose and develop gasification research projects.

Moreover, 14-17 August SFC would a host a summer school designed to give graduate students an “overview of the subject area combined with a deeper theoretical understanding”, the SFC web said. Further information on the summer school would be published there shortly, Gebart said.

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Three senior members of Bio4Energy have fully or partly changed jobs. RikardGebart MagnusMarklundAll smiles as B4E scientist Rikard Gebart hands over the leadership of the Energy Technology Centre at Piteå to Magnus Marklund, he too of B4E, with a symbolic gesture. Photo by courtesy of the ETC.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., head of the B4E Feedstock Platform, will be transitioning into a new role with Stora Enso, the multinational pulp and paper company, stepping up his presence at the firm’s Stockholm-based headquarters to 80 per cent by the end of this year. For now, he retains the leadership of the Feedstock research team in B4E.

After some 20 years in the academy, most of which at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), professor Sundberg wanted to make the partial transition to industry to “try something new.

"I will be responsible for research and development within forest biotechnology. In particular I will work towards our eucalypt plantations in South America and Asia, notably in China", Sundberg said of the work ahead at Stora Enso.
 
“I have the ambition to keep my responsibilities in Bio4Energy during (the remaining) 20 per cent of my time. We will see how this develops”, said Sundberg who has been a key figure over the years at the Umeå Plant Science Centre, a research centre of excellence shared by SLU and Umeå University.
Attachments:
Download this file (Bio4Energy_pressmeddelande_Ledande_bioraff-forskare_till_industrin_AS120411.pdf)Leading_biorefinery_reserachers_to_industry_B4E_press_release_in_Swedish[ ]109 kB

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Bio4Energy scientists have said that 45 per cent of fossil fuels used in RikardGebart UREMRikard Gebart said almost most half Sweden's transport fuel could come from biomass. Photo by Bio4Energy.
road transport in Sweden could be replaced by renewable alternatives produced by gasification of forest-sourced biomass or its waste streams. However, “smart” solutions such as pretreatment technologies to render the raw material more malleable had to be further developed for the biofuels, in turn, to be produced on large scale and become a cost competitive alternative to fuels based on fossil oil, they said.

The comments came at an Umeå Renewable Energy Meeting, this month at Umeå University in northern Sweden, where This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.of B4E serves as a professor.

“We have to build huge, extremely costly infrastructure. We need pretreatment technology and gasification technology… Switching from fossil fuels to biomass is not that straight forward. You have to do it smart, preferably using torrefaction”, Nordin told an audience of 60, mostly academics.

AndersNordin UREMForest-sourced biomass needs pretreatment to be cost efficent in large-scale biofuel production, according to Anders Nordin. Photo by Bio4Energy.Roasting biomass

He was referring to a pretreatment method which, he said, had similarities with roasting coffee beans, although in the case of the B4E research the material to be roasted, or torrefied, was forest-sourced biomass or grasses. Torrefaction would rid the biomass of excess moisture, protect it from contamination and render it more homogenous, giving it similar density properties to coal, Nordin said. All of which would make for easier transportation, storage and conversion of the biomass in the gasifier.

Indeed, in a recent report analysing the European biofuels market, German consultants ecoprog GmgH found the supply to refineries with feedstock, including its transportation, to be the most cost-intensive step in the value chain for biofuels.

Attachments:
Download this file (Umeå_Renewable_Energy_Conference_2012.pdf)Gasification_for_\'clean\'_fuel_production_RikardGebart_March_2012[ ]4033 kB

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The Bio4Energy website has a new section featuring its latest JonasHedlund HanZhou_ASScientists Jonas Hedlund (right) and Han Zhou of the Bio4Energy Catalysis and Separation Platform work together. Photo by Bio4Energy.
publications, which can be accessed by clicking on the ‘Research’ heading of this website. Although in 2011 B4E was not yet fully operational, its researchers published more than 60 scientific articles in the peer-reviewed literature. 

"This shows that Bio4Energy has already started to deliver results", said Stellan Marklund, manager of the B4E research environment. The Swedish government's "support for Bio4Energy has enabled it to be a catalyst... thanks to which the research has been sped up".

Zeolite membranes for separation

Breakthroughs included results by This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.of Luleå University of Technology and his team on the B4E Catalysis and Separation Platform, which devised a method for characterising defects in zeolite membranes with a size down to 0.7 nanometre.

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This month Bio4Energry scientists and their associates from nine countries will meet at Luleå, UlrikaRova 2011Ulrika Rova will lead a meeting to design a Bio4Energy Graduate School. Photo by Bio4Energy.
Sweden, to lay down a framework for a B4E Graduate School for doctoral students.
Overarching themes of the courses to be offered, aims and curricula of the graduate school, as well as the number and extent of agreements with foreign academic institutions will be hammered out by the 30-strong group.

Graduate school project leaders at Luleå University of Technology, Sven Molin and Ulrika Rova, expressed optimism that the 1-2 February meeting would produce the stuff of an application to ERASMUS Mundus, a European Union funding scheme for foreign exchange and education on the post-secondary level, the deadline for which expires late April this year.

“The meeting will be a kick-off point for designing the application. We will come up with a rough draft for the structure of examinations, the consortium agreement,... research topics, the structure of the organisation and, of course, the complete framework agreement for the PhD education and the associate partners”, said Molin, a former senior lecturer in Electronics at LTU in northern Sweden.

A complete programme

A grant from ERASMUS Mundus could allow the B4E partners to offer PhD students and researchers from all over the world training in almost every aspect of conducting research across the various links of the biorefinery value chain.

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Today, January 20, Bio4Energy is featured alongside key players in DIFutureEnergy 012Bio4Energy was featured along with key Swedish energy players in a Dagens Industri Future Energy newspaper insert. Photo by Bio4Energy.
the Swedish energy sector in the Swedish daily Dagens Industri, in
its Future Energy insert, under the heading “Green Gold to Replace Fossil Oil”.

B4E teamed up with Umeå University, the B4E lead partner in northern Sweden, and with highly talented researchers of its Chemical Biological Centre, to spread the message about the way in which B4E intends to make a substantial contribution towards creating sustainable biorefinery based on forest-sourced materials or organic waste.

“We have drawn together top-qualified researcher and leading companies in green technology”, Stellan Marklund said in the Future Energy insert of the 90 scientists and some 20 companies that make up B4E. They are spread across northern and central Sweden at Umeå University, Luleå University of Technology, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the research institutes Innventia and the Energy Technology Center at Piteå.

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A Bio4Energy-led research project to seek out the most cost-efficient JoakimLundgrenBio4Energy scientist Joakim Lundgren will be leading a study to identify sites for biofuels' production in Sweden. Photo by Anna Strom©.
sites in Sweden for second-generation biofuels’ production could kick off last month as the Swedish Knowledge Centre for Renewable Transportation Fuels, f3, decided to back it by almost SEK2 million.

As a first leg, the scientists behind it will develop a theoretical model to guide policy makers as they endeavour to match the availability of raw materials for biorefinery—woody biomass or organic waste—with parameters such as availability of land, cost of construction and production, plus ease of access for industry and environmental impacts. This first step will also entail constructing scenarios—snapshots of three likely futures for biofuels’ development in Sweden—based on variables ranging from energy prices, demand for biomass and transport fuels to assumed effects of policies governing the industry.

In Sweden, “full-scale biorefinery [plants in which] to produce biofuels are next to none”, according to project leader This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. of the energy sciences’ division of Luleå University of Technology (LTU) in northern Sweden.

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A year in the making, Bio4Energy wants to thank all of its followers in 2011. Northern forestBio4Energy designs tools and methods for making biofuels and 'green' chemicals from forest-sourced materials. The snap is of a forest in the Swedish part of the boreal belt. Photo by courtesy of Umeå University.

So far the B4E members have been busy building a research environment in bioenergy and biorefinery which links up three universities in northern Sweden, over 20 industrial partners and a handful of research institutes.

This year has seen plans for new research projects being drawn up by the seven B4E platforms dealing with forest-sourced feedstock, thermochemistry, biochemistry and process integration, as well those concerned with pretreatment and fractionation of raw materials, catalysis and separation, or environmental checks and balances.

Further, B4E has liaised with EU and Swedish authorities to spread the word about the potential embedded in the development of sustainable biorefinery based on non-food raw materials, mainly forest-sourced feedstock in the case of B4E, and seen several new cooperations take root.

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In the Press

Biokol kan bidra till fossilfri järn- och stålproduktion, Industrinyheter.se
Experten förklarar: Så ska grönt flygbränsle framställas i Långsele, SVT Nyheter Västernorrland
Bio4Energy at Umeå University: Nytt sätt att framställa biobaserade produkter, Process Nordic
“Look before you Leap”: European Science Academies Caution against Subsidies for Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage, European Academies’ Science Advisory Council/Cision