Background:

Around 15 million private forest owners own about 60% of the forest land in the EU. Privately-owned forests have an average size of 13 ha, but the majority of them are less than 3 ha in size. The forest owners supply the raw material for the forest based industries with the help of 492.000 persons employed in forestry. Forestry and forest-based and related industries employ about 3.4 million people. European forest management is threatened by the prospect of increasing labour cost and stable or even falling prices for forest products, partly due to the availability of extremely productive and cheap sources of wood fibre outside Europe. The industry suffers from severe job losses due to continued increases in mechanisation without a corresponding increase in production and only 60% of the annual forest growth is being harvested. At the same time estimates indicate that EU will fall short by about 46 Mtoe (Mega tonnes oil equivalent) of the target for renewable energy in the redefined Biomass Action Plan of 2005.

Our idea:

Our response to the needs to decrease costs, to create jobs, and to increase biomass energy use is to increase the value of tree felling by developing a mobile, very rapid (< 1 s) pyrolysis plant that can process forest floor residue and wood waste on location to bio-oil and charcoal. 15 Mtoe of forest residue of little or no commercial value at present can be turned into fossil fuel replacements. Competitiveness will improve or be sustained for all players in the forestry and forestry based industry sector and manufacturers of machines and equipment will get huge exportation opportunities. Job creation is estimated to more than 10,000 of whereof almost 3,000 will be in the rural areas with forest after year 4 with 400 plants in operation and 400 manufactured per year. 400 plants will replace fossil heavy fuel oil to reduce fossil CO₂ emissions by 5.4 million tonnes and close 3.5 % of the gap to reach the EU Biomass Action Plan goals.

Type of funding Scheme:          

FP7-SME-2007-2

Timeline:

Start date: 1 January 2009

End date: 31 December 2011