Croatia – a growing bioenergy pearl

With a population of just over 3.8 million, Croatia is one of the smaller EU Member States but it is also one of the richest in terms of biodiversity. Forests cover around 44 percent or almost 2.5 million hectares of the land area and comprise three ecoregions: Dinaric Mountains mixed forests, Pannonian mixed forests, and Illyrian deciduous forests.

PEARL Infrastructure Capital, a Luxembourg-headed private equity investment fund dedicated to financing environmental infrastructure projects, is one of the largest bioenergy operators in Croatia.

Since acquiring ENERGY 9, its first biomass-fired combined heat and power (CHP) plant in Croatia in 2019, the company has acquired two more installations including UNI VIRIDAS, currently the country’s largest biomass-fired CHP plant. Combined the three CHP plants have an installed capacity of 34 MWth and 16.6 MWe. In 2022, the combined output was 168 GWh of heat and 134 GWh of electricity to the grid.

In collaboration with Hrvatske Šume, the public organisation tasked with managing Croatian forests, all three plants owned by PEARL use forest- and wood processing residues as fuel.

Located in the Slavonia region, the 13 MWth and 5 MWe ENERGY 9 CHP plant provides thermal energy for several industrial actors operating in the wood and agricultural sector. In Babina Greda in the Vukovar-Srijem region, the UNI VIRIDAS plant is with its 16 MWth and 8.6 MWe capacity currently the largest biomass cogeneration plant in Croatia. The plant supplies heat to agricultural projects as well as to a multinational wood furniture manufacturing company.

In Virovitica in the northern part of Slavonia region, the A&A BIOENERGY plant is the smallest of PEARL’s Croatian fleet– 5 MWth and 3 MWe. Apart from Hrvatske Šume, the main supplier of the biomass fuel, Croatian company AMS Biomasa is both a supplier of fuel and the offtaker of the heat which is used for its industrial drying processes.

Another bioenergy player is Croatia’s national energy company, Hrvatska elektroprivreda (HEP Group) that currently has two biomass-fired cogeneration plants in its portfolio – BE-TO Osijek CHP and BE-TO Sisak CHP respectively. Commissioned in 2018, both plants have 10 MWth and 3 MWe installed capacity and use woody biomass as fuel. Both are built adjacent to existing HEP energy plant assets in Osijek and Sisak respectively, supplying process steam to local industries and district heating to the towns of Osijek and Sisak.