NER 300 funding all in vein
Sweden and the forest went out winners when three Swedish projects were earmarked to receive EU support from the NER300 funding program. This provided confirmation of the high quality of Swedish energy research and expertise. But now the program that was ranked the highest has been discontinued.
However, the commercial basis did not exist and was not expected to materialize in the near future.
“We have invested several years of work and put our top engineers on the job, but the market conditions changed during the four to five years we worked on the project,” says Magnus Wikström, SVP Strategic Development at BillerudKorsnäs, to papernet.se
The forecast for the energy market in Europe is not the same today as it was when the project was first launched. Over this period, Europe and the US have stagnated and the conditions for pyrolysis oil as a replacement fuel have changed.
According to Magnus Wikström, further guarantees from commercial players would have been necessary to reduce the level of risk and realize the large-scale production of pyrolysis oil in the current climate.
“To realize a project of this scale, I think a sharing of risk at an earlier stage would be necessary with several parties involved. It’s not enough for one single company to take part in such a large readjustment process as the transformation of the energy market,” says Magnus Wikström.
“Under the prevailing conditions, the tendency is that only projects that do not affect our energy realignment become a reality.”