Europe is planning to go ‘green’ in an innovative way. Later this year, it is planning to launch a new road fuel — made from straw and wood chips. It will be provided from a Shell and Choren Industries, the German biofuel company-developed pilot plant.
This synthetic diesel is expected to provide a remarkable thrust to the bio-diesel industry. It is made using a process transforming biomass to liquid and above all it uses waste plant material, and not valuable food crops.
The pilot plant is built near Freiberg and will be producing 15,000 tonnes of synthetic diesel per year. Choren has dubbed this synthetic diesel as Sunfuel.
A €500 million (£336 million) much bigger plant will begin construction next year in Schleswig-Holstein. Once made, it will be capable of producing 200,000 tonnes of BTL. This scale of production would definitely speed up the product’s coming to the commercial market.
