Industrial Process Heat: Case Study 7 – Combustion of wood chips in a dairy in Denmark
This case study is part of a second series of reports on the use of bioenergy in industry to supply process heat. In 2021, five of the tasks involved in the IEA Bioenergy Technology Collaboration Programme collaborated to produce case studies and a policy synthesis report on biomass based industrial heat. In 2024, another 5 examples were prepared by Task 32 on application of biomass combustion in industry.
These additional cases represent a large diversity of applications and illustrate that biomass combustion can be a commercially attractive option for lowering the carbon footprint of companies. The examples also illustrate that the optimum configuration depends on local availability of biomass resources, characteristics of the heat demand, availability of space, capital, etc.
While there is a large potential to displace fossil fuels with biomass fuels in the large and energy intensive industries (steel, cement, etc), there are also many small and medium sized process industries such as food industries, paper industries, etc. with potential. In contrast to the larger energy intensive industries, where these case typically require that large volumes of biomass are shipped to an individual site, the heat demand in these smaller industries can often be better matched with the biomass resources that may already be locally available, resulting in smaller transportation distances.