Borregaard invests in multi-million euro bioethanol plant upgrade

Norwegian biorefinery operator Borregaard has decided to invest NOK 63 million (€6.8m) in a project including an upgrade of a bioethanol plant and a facility to capture and store biogas. 

The project has been awarded a grant of NOK 18.9 million from Enova, a Norwegian government agency which promotes environmentally friendly restructuring of energy end-use, renewable energy production, and new energy and climate technology.

The bioethanol plant upgrade, to be implemented at the company site is Sarpsborg, Norway, includes installing modern production technology which will reduce the specific use of energy in the production process.

As a result of the rebuild, there will be sufficient capacity to deliver the whole production as 100% water-free bioethanol.

This market is growing, mainly driven by increased demand for bioethanol in automotive fuel.

Borregaard is a significant producer of biogas from process residues, which is used internally as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

The new installation will make it possible to capture and store a bigger part of the available biogas, and thus increase the internal use.

The project work will start up during the second half of 2016, with the bioethanol rebuild scheduled to be completed in 2017 and the biogas installation will be finished in 2018.