| dc.description.abstract | The ongoing greening of the European energy supply leads to ever growing demand of renewable energies. Solid biomass is currently the largest source of renewable energy in NW-EU contributing 45% of total renewable energy in 2014. Presently, there are some new developments making the future development of solid biomass use uncertain. Firstly; solid biofuels have to compete on costs not only with cheap fossil fuels but also with other renewable energy options such as wind and solar whose costs are rapidly declining. And for small scale heat demand, traditional a sector with a high share of solid biofuel use, new heating options are coming available such as heat humps and geothermal heat. Finally, the sustainability of (imported) solid biomass supply has become a topic of public debate which has influenced the governmental support for solid biomass.
Therefore, Port of Rotterdam Authority wants to improve their insight in how solid biomass demand in its contestable hinterlands (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK) could develop in the future so as to be as competitive as possible with other NW-EU harbors seeking to provide this contestable hinterland with access to overseas solid supply markets. Therefor PoR want to update their outdated capacity study incorporating the latest developments influencing future NW-EU solid biofuel demand.
Three solid biomass demand markets were identified which have the potential to import (additional) extra-EU biomass (in the near future). Centralized users, small scale heat and biorefining. To cope with the uncertainties regarding future solid biomass demand, four scenarios were created, varying the three main factors of uncertainty; namely solid biomass price competitiveness, total final energy demand and governmental support for solid biomass.
The scenarios showed little perspective for PoR for additional centralized demand import flows, since there is both little growth in this sector and logistics tends to be locally handled. Biorefining is still in its infancy and only for two of the four scenarios imports flows (1 - 7 Mt/y) are expected. Small scale heat however showed significant growth in three out of the four scenarios, growing from 2015’s 34,4 Mt/y wood pellet equivalent (wp-eq.) to 61,8 – 89,3 Mt wo-eq. in 2030. However, since the European solid biomass supply will also grow in this same period it is still unclear if extra-EU imports are needed. Moreover, the three demand markets (could) have different pretreatment preferences (wood pellets vs. wood chips) and shipping methods (mostly bulk but possibly prepackaged wood pellets in containers for small scale heat) will could lead to fragmented logistics. | |
