The first biochar plant in Sweden

One of the oldest cities in the Nordics on account of its strategic location overlooking the narrowest part of the Öresund strait. Helsingborg is already “historic” when it comes to biomass – the world’s first ever transatlantic shipment of wood pellets arrived in April 1998 to Öresundskraft’s combined heat and power (CHP) plant in Helsingborg.

Twenty-five years on, the city can add the “Biochar Capital of Sweden” to its biomass merit listing, launching the Stockholm biochar project. In March 2017, the project commissioned one of the first facilities in Sweden to process urban green waste into biochar for use in the Capital’s parks and green spaces.

Developing Filborna

In January 2020, the regional waste management company Skånes Renhållnings AB (NSR), announced plans to invest in a biochar production facility at the Filborna site located on the outskirts of Helsingborg. At Filborna, NSR operates a materials recycling centre, and a technical landfill along with a landfill gas to power unit. The integrated site also houses a state-of-the-art waste-to-energy combined heat and power (CHP) plant. Operated by municipal energy company Öresundskraft, the plant processes around 220,000 tones of non-recyclable household- and industrial solid waste annually, providing heat to the city’s expansive district heating network, and power to the grid.

There is also a biogas plant on site that processes around 150,000 tonnes of food- and municipal organic waste (MOW) to produce biogas.

Ideal site

With a SEK 12,4 million grant from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency’s “Climate step” program, the SEK 50 million NSR biochar project entailed building an urban green waste into biochar while providing heat to the district heating network. The facility, currently the largest of its kind in Sweden, was officially inaugurated in June 2022.

Novel integration of Nordic technologies

The NSR biochar plant essentially consists of two novel technology lots that loosely can be described as outdoors and indoors. The former includes everything from the biomass feedstock bin to the reactor infeed storage bin, while the latter is the pyrolysis reactor and allied processes. The former was supplied by Danish company EUROmilling, which designed, produced, and delivered a complete solution including the control system for receiving, grinding, screening, drying, and intermediate storage of the biomass reactor.

Read more about Sweden’s first Biochar plant here.