Tankful of wood Great opportunities for renewable energy

Tankful of wood

Tar was Finland’s most important export product from the seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth century. With the adoption of steam power, the forest products industry developed into the leading export industry beginning in the mid-1800s.

Finland is still the world’s most export-driven forest industry country in relation to its population.The current restructuring of the forest products industry will inevitably reduce the manufacturing in Finland of traditional forest products industry products such as sawn goods, pulp and paper. This means that the amount of timber logged for processing will decline. More wood will be left in the forests, but somewhat paradoxically it will not be available for energy production, either.

Finland’s renewable wood-based energy is generated from the pulp industry’swood-containing spent liquor, bark from trees debarked for industrial use and logging residue such as branches, treetops and stumps.

At the moment, wood-based fuel accounts for 20 per cent of Finland’s total energy consumption, which is the lion’s share of all renewable energy. According to the EU’s 20-20-20 formula, Finland should raise renewable energy’s share of its energy consumption to 38 per cent by the year 2020.

It is clear that the target can only be reached by sharply increasing woodbased energy production along with the use of other biomass.

New directions

The targets are tough, but it will still not make sense to incinerate saw or pulp timber for energy. Refining wood into pulp and paper is more than 10 times as labour-intensive as burning it for energy and the multiplier effect on the GDP is six-fold.

Because of the high added value of traditional forest industry products, industrial timber could only be shifted into energy production with subsidies so high that they would distort both the timber and energy markets.

In any case, in conventional energy production, wood is only a competitive fuel through combined heat and power (CHP) production, an area where Finland is one of Europe’s leaders.

Compared with standard fossil fuels, wood is a very moist fuel. It is not worth using it to generate solely electricity through traditional condensation technology.

Its efficiency remains very low, with less than 30 per cent of the wood’s energy being captured. The use of forest chips in CHP production is growing. At the same time, the forest industry is laying the foundation for exploitation of forest chips in production of transport fuels based on new gasification technology. This also opens up a new future for the forest industry itself as new refineries are only worth building in conjunction with pulp and paper mills.

By Risto Pitkänen
Photo Kreetta Järvenpää