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European Shell and Choren Industries turns to wood chips and straw in search for the road fuel of the future - by Carl Mortished
A new road fuel made from wood chips and straw will be launched in Europe later this year from a pilot plant developed by Shell and Choren Industries, the German biofuel company. The synthetic diesel, made using a novel biomass-to-liquids (BTL) process, will shift the biodiesel industry into a higher gear by using waste plant material instead of valuable food crops.
The pilot plant, near Freiberg, will produce 15,000 tonnes per year of synthetic diesel, which Choren has dubbed Sunfuel. Construction of a much bigger plant in Schleswig-Holstein, costing €500 million and capable of producing 200,000 tonnes of BTL, will begin next year in an effort to quickly bring the product up to commercial scale. Massive political and regulatory pressure is building on energy companies to find low-carbon alternatives to conventional road fuels.
All the technologies are based on the Fischer-Tropsch process, invented in Germany in the 1930s to synthesise liquid fuels from coal. Shell is already the biggest biofuel distributor in the world.
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