Raw Material Supplies

The great challenge in supplying or coordinating biomass is getting sufficient amounts of raw materials to SunFuel production units quickly and cheaply – and ensuring that further supplies will be available from the same source.
The requirements sound really simple: the biomass should be dry, free of any interfering substances and free-flowing and have a high degree of density. The raw material also has to comply with what is known in Germany as the Biomass Order.

Even if this amount of biomass, approx. 1,000,000 t per industrial-scale unit, is far greater than anything else required for renewable energy, there is no doubt that long-term supplies of these raw materials will be available for production facilities.

If, to illustrate the point, all the biomass comes from agricultural sources, plants would only have to be grown on farmland within a radius of under 15 km from the production site – assuming that each hectare yields 15 t of dry biomass. As the amount of biomass needed is not the restricting factor, the actual challenge lies in optimizing the production and supply chains.

Innovative processes for growing biomass are being tested and new ideas for biomass supplies and logistics are being evaluated. Huge opportunities exist for compacting various types of biomass into universal fuels, e.g. briquettes, to improve energy and cost efficiency. As for logistics, it is possible to adopt proven ideas from the wood processing industry or factories processing raw agricultural materials.

Large cellulose factories, for example, process far more than 1,000,000 t of dry matter every year – with far less raw materials available than those for the planned SunDiesel^® production facilities.

It is becoming increasingly important to develop innovative ideas for producing biomass, especially on agricultural land. Even if we are still talking about fallow land and the overproduction of foodstuffs here in Europe, the amount of useful land available will be the only restricting factor for long-term biofuel production. This has two repercussions: a) as much biomass as possible should be converted into fuel and b) the amounts harvested per hectare have to be increased.
The “Agency of Renewable Resources” (FNR), which operates under the umbrella of the German Ministry for Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture, assumes that, on the basis of current average agricultural yields, each hectare could yield 3,300 liters of BtL or SunDiesel^® every year. This figure will certainly rise in future
if further research is carried out, especially on plant cultivation.

As a result of new cultivation techniques or particular concepts, it is already possible to achieve yields of 30 t of dry matter per hectare. This translates into approx. 8,000 liters of SunDiesel^®.