REPROMO - Renewable Energy Promotion Campaign for the Realisation of Trans-national RES Projects, especially in CEEC

Mr.Sándor Bánó – President Körmezo Biomass Foundation – Risk Management for RES action in CEEC

Mr. Bánó described first the importance of high quality energy crops.

Biomass offers the opportunity to develop integrated schemes from primary production through conversion to high quality energy crops – and industrial products, up to the end users new technologies. Full biomass systems can present considerable complexity in terms of multidisciplinary technologies and the integration of those. The complexity derives also from a combination of factors, which are not only techno-economic but include the environment, the agricultural socio-economic structure and policies, the rural regional development and international trade.

To better understand the definitions, Mr. Bano described also the meaning of energy crops: Energy crops can be classified into those providing:
Solid fuels for combustion, thermal processing and electricity generation; yielding solid, liquid and gaseous fuels;
Solid fuel crops include energy coppice, switchgrass, miscanthus and whole-crop cereals (corn);
Liquid fuels are bio-ethanol and bio-diesel.

Mr. Bánó mentioned also some strategies to increase the accessibility of biomass heating fuels:

First, the densification of the material, producing pellets. The process of pellet making was developed for the livestock feed industry to produce alfalfa pellets. The biomass is chopped to a length of fiber that ensures the pellet can be properly formed. It is then continuously fed into an extruder. The goal is to produce a pellet with a good hardness, uniform weight and a minimum production of fines.

The other product would be “Green Briquettes”. Briquetting enables a substantial volume reduction so that briquetted material ends up with approximately two-thirds of energy content of coal on a volume basis. It is a much less expensive operation than pelleting because it requires approximately 70% less energy to process material and operating costs are substantially lower.

The third possibility: Farmers with difficult access to pelletized fuel started to burn corn in their stoves. A number of manufacturers now make stoves, which will burn shelled corn. Corn burning stoves usually have a combustion air fan and a fuel stoker same as in pellet fuel stoves.

Furthermore Mr. Bano mentioned the results and development of the North-American biomass industry.

Concerning Europe Mr. Bánó called the attention for a different problem: Called – policy for agriculture.
Paradoxically, the crisis is too much farm production due to too much of the EUC budget going to farm subsidies, or too much subsidy going to the wrong product. The management of the crisis situation will have to left to the politicians in the short term.

In the search for longer term solutions, which have a real chance of resolving the conflict, Mr. Bánó mentioned two options to approach:

The problem can be viewed as one of supply, with the result that land needs to be set aside to reduce production in order to resolve the conflict; in other words, put farmers on an agricultural version of unemployment insurance program, setting a side about 10-20% of their grain producing land, to produce energy crops.

The second approach is to say that the problem is one of demand. If food markets are saturated, it becomes the time to search out alternatives, such as non-food markets, for agricultural production.
The concept is called demand enhancement and this is the rationale behind new industrial crop development strategies in Europe.

The key to unlocking the potential energy market is the ability to produce a reasonably priced farm derived biomass source in Europe. It is clear that biomass will have a difficult time penetrating energy markets in Europe for two reasons:

Production capacity, with the lack of land base availability hindering opportunities to make a substantial contribution to conventional energy displacement; and
Producing biomass at a competitive price.

(Small farms and a heavily subsidized agricultural system do not land themselves well to the production of abundant cheap biomass, which is required to penetrate competitive energy markets.)

Mr. Bánó concluded his lecture with a message for the Central Eastern European Countries biomass production:

To give subsidies for buying Pellet stoves, give subsidies using pellets or “green briquettes” produced and developed through the ‘Renewable Energy Sources’ action. The state owned Forestry’s should start to develop and produce pellets from forest residues and should not burn it, polluting the air. With the subsidies and natural gas prices going up, the local markets will be very easy to conquer. It is wrong to subsidize the natural gas consumption, that subsidy should go to the people who want to use renewable energy.

For the interim, until the local markets are not developed completely, the pellets produced should be exported, maybe to Sweden or Germany? This is a future for the agriculture, to specifically for Hungary who is purchasing airplanes from Sweden in a trade swap.
If and when the market is created the farmers were always been good at producing, and consumers never had a problem using goods, which are price worthy.
The wear link, especially for new products, has been how to get the ‘product to market’. To create a market for energy crops, there needs to be a strategy, and capital to be investing in it.