such as stoves and small furnaces.

With the introduction of the 1991 CO₂tax in Sweden, biomass was the least costly alternative. The tax was not levied on peat – and therefore peat was also used to a large extent. Today in Sweden, around 65 percent of all district heating is based on biofuels – wood fuels like chips, bark, sawdust, forest residues, recycled wood, peat, municipal waste, etc. The rest is mainly waste heat from large industries, heat pumps using waste water and some fossil fuels, mainly for peak load. A couple of large coal and natural gas plants are the rare exceptions to the rule. Sweden has a total of 480 district heating plants using biomass (i.e., larger than 2 GWh heat load, some up to 1 TWh or more).

Today many of these heat plants are rebuilt for electricity production. Every new heat plant, above a certain size, is today built as a CHP with the heat used for district heating. Most district heating systems are public utility companies owned by the local municipalities. But many cities have also sold their utilities to larger energy companies, such as Vattenfall (state-owned), Fortum (Finnish, partly state-owned) and E.ON. These three companies are major players also in the bioenergy field.

Bioenergy Use in Sweden 1970-2006

Translations for Key:

Biodrivmedel (biofuels used in transportation)

Bostäder (heating of individual homes)

El i fjärrvärme (electricity in district heating)

Fjärrvärme (district heating)

Ind för elprod (bioelectricity in industry)

Ind minus lutar (industry minus black liquor)

Lutar (black liquor, a liquid fuel byproduct of papermaking)

fuels, and sometimes they deliver waste heat to nearby cities for use in district heating. Bioenergy is becoming an increasingly important part of their operations and profits. In the future, the forest industries are expected to be turned into biorefineries producing not only timber, pulp and paper, but also liquid and solid biofuels, electricity, heat and chemicals.

Forest Industry’s Role

In addition to district heating, the forest industry has also played an important role in the development of a

market for solid biofuels (table 2). Byproducts and residues from forest industry and forestry have been ‘the low-hanging fruits’ in this market. Bark used to be a big environmental hazard, but now using bark as fuel solved this problem.

Today forestry companies are active in the biomass field. They have largely converted their own boilers from fossil fuels to biomass, and they produce bioelectricity for their own needs and for sale. (They may freely deliver electricity to the grid when they have a surplus and also get green certificates for the electricity for their own use.) These companies produce and trade in wood

Table 2. Wood Energy Use in Selected European Union Countries in 2004.*

Consumption of Primary Energy

From Wood Energy

Total Per Person (million tons of (tons of oil oil equivalent) equivalent)

France 9.180 0.15

Sweden 8.260 0.92

Finland 7.232 1. 39

Germany 6.263 0.08

Spain 4.107 0.10

Poland 3.927 0.10

Austria 3.499 0.43

Portugal 2.666 0.26

Latvia 1.300 0.57

United Kingdom 1.231 0.02

* Note: This includes only wood fuels, not agricultural fuels (e.g., straw).

Source: Wood Energy Barometer, EurObserv’ER, October 2005.

Gross Electricity
Generation from
Wood Energy (TWh)

1.737

6.091

9.858

3.900

2.214

0.610

1.663

1.082

0.006

1.949

Untapped Resources

There are still untapped biomass resources within Scandinavian forestry, mainly forest residues from clear-cutting and thinning. In the rest of Europe, even the low-hanging fruit – different kinds of residues – have not yet been tapped.

More and more interest is being generated in biomass from agriculture. Here the first priority is to use residues and byproducts for heat, electricity and biogas production. Conventional crops like grain and oilseed plants can be used for biofuel production. Dedicated energy crops will give higher energy yields. Among these crops are woody crops like willows and hybrid poplars, and grass crops like miscanthus and reed canary grass. Willows for short- rotation coppice production (i.e., for harvesting every three to five years as new growth from the same stumps) are planted on 15,000 hectares ( 37 acres) in southern Sweden.