Danish company specialises in gasification of wood chips 

Wood chips will be a source of heat and power for the homes of the future. This is the hope of biomass technology supplier Weiss A/S, which has entered into a cooperation with the Technical University of Denmark and COWI to further develop so-called two-stage gasification technology.

The initiative follows many years of research and development at the Technical University of Denmark, where a small, fully automatic two-stage gasification plant has been developed that converts wood chips into a combustible gas which is used in a gas engine to produce heat and power.

The good results achieved with the gasification plant have encouraged interest from Weiss A/S in further developing the process.

Pilot gasification

With support from Elkraft-system, the company is establishing a pilot gasification plant to demonstrate that the two-stage process is capable of sufficient capacity to be of interest for district heating plants – while at the same time retaining the good levels achieved through experiments with the smaller gasification plant at the Technical University of Denmark.

The pilot gasification plant will be about ten times the size of the one at the university.

Weiss Director Morten Grøn explains: ”This project is necessary in order to demonstrate the process using sufficient capacity to show that economically profitable and environmentally friendly biomass gasification plants can realistically be established in Denmark. The two-stage gasification process also holds tremendous potential for many other countries.”

Flexible use with natural gas

Gasification plants can replace biomass plants, that today only produce heat, but it is also possible to use the gas produced by gasification in existing natural gas fired combined heat and power plants.

Today the natural gas network is sufficiently well developed and natural gas supplies many Danish towns and cities with energy. In fact, many towns and cities have already established combined heat and power plants based on natural gas, whereby the gas is used to produce both heat and power.

”Gasification plants can be used in combination with natural gas in many of the gas engine plants found in Denmark. Given that heat and power transmission networks and grids, buildings and engines are already operative and can be reused, it would be possible to convert these plants from fossil fuel to biomass as gas production from the North sea becomes reduced,” explains COWI Project Manager Jens Dall Bentzen, who has been involved in developing the two-stage gasification process since 1995.

By Christina Tækker, cht@cowi.dk

Published 04.05.2005