A European database with 4,000 bioenergy plants

According to Avebiom, last March the execution period of the BASIS project financed by the European Intelligent Energy Europe (IEE) program ended and the final technical report has just been presented to the commission. The project was coordinated by the European Biomass Association (AEBIOM) and had several national associations in its consortium, such as AVEBIOM in Spain.

The objective of the project was to create tools for bioenergy project promoters to understand biomass potential, competitors, restrictions due to environmental causes, etc. For this purpose, a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) platform has been created, which constitutes the main result of the project, in which, thanks to a database of 4,000 bioenergy plants (generating electricity, heat or cogeneration) and several layers of information (infrastructure, sustainability, production potential, etc.) the most favorable places can be located to implement a new plant or simply use it to obtain information about the sector, possible clients, etc. Although the platform was launched some time ago (late 2015), in the last months of the project, February - March 2016, the database has been updated and the software application improved. The information collected has been very well received by companies in the sector and by administrations. The European Commission, which is currently studying the possibility of publishing a directive with sustainability requirements for solid biomass, has been able, for the first time, to see data from facilities across Europe and estimates of their consumption.

In terms of sustainability, on the one hand, the current state of the countries of the European Union has been studied. Spain is still far from the figures of Germany, which has almost 72% of its forest area certified PEFC or FSC since it only has 9.43%, but there are interesting data such as the 64% increase in the wood stock standing (from 594 million m3 in 1996 to 921 million m3 in 2006) and that there has been no change in the use of forest towards another use.

In addition, an analysis of sustainability criteria applicable to the production of wood chips has been carried out and they have been applied to the GIS platform (protection of lands of high ecological value or protection of lands with high carbon stocks, etc.). In total, 7 criteria have been selected and applied to the platform, for example in the cases mentioned through a layer with information on protected lands that cannot be partially or totally exploited and including another layer of information with stock changes. carbon in recent years.

Finally, it is worth noting that the project has given continuity to another previous project called Cross Border and to this end a series of indicators have been updated that indicate the “attractiveness” of markets (in this case of sliver) and continuity has been given to the B2B (Business to Business) platform as a meeting point for companies.