Impact on industrial and other user communities

This project will have impact on both producers of liquid and solid biofuels and users of these products, e.g. powerplants. In both cases traceability and documentation of product quality and energy content of the fuel are of key importance. New calibration methods, reference materials and procedures to be developed in this project will enable improvement of the quality control of liquid and solid biofuels and the comparability of measurements across the community and between dealers and buyers.

The introduction of the new online methods and traceability schemes for moisture and ash content in biofuel power plants will allow continuous accurate measurements of the biofuels’ properties and will result in a high degree of digitalisation. This will lead to better control, more efficient use of the fuel, lower consumption, and minimalised emissions.

Automated and representative sampling of the fuels combined with traceable measurements will improve quality control and support fair trade. In this project, optimised automatic sampling will be implemented and commercialised by an industrial partner.

The impact is significant. When heat production taxes are calculated based on an estimated energy content of the solid biofuel, it has major economic consequences if this estimate is subject to errors caused by either non-representable sampling or measurements based on non-ideal, slow, offline methods. The amount of solid biomass used in a modern power plant is large. In the EU the total primary production of renewable energy based on biomass is about 130 kilotons of oil equivalent yearly and this number is increasing rapidly.