Coming soon to Iceland?
Iceland was already one of the world’s leaders in the use of renewable energy. Almost all electricity production and heating comes from geothermal and hydropower. Now they’ve set out to reduce their dependency on foreign oil for transportation.
Iceland is a nation powered by renewable energy. You see lots of stats thrown around but, the bottom line is pretty much the whole country is powered by geothermal and hydroelectric power. That is except for transportation. The country, like most countries, still depends almost entirely on foreign oil imports.
And, Icelanders love their cars, almost as much as Americans. Except that fuel there is at least twice as expensive. But that isn’t the real problem. Iceland is a really clean country and they intend to keep it that way. So they are purposely moving toward any and all available renewable energy technologies. They already had one of the first hydrogen filling stations in the world and do operate a small fleet of hydro-powered public buses. But, it seems that the movement towards hydrogen-powered cars is in a bit of a lull.
Enter Biogas and Biofuels. There are currently several companies currently operating various pilot plants to capture landfill gas and to extract biogas and biofuels including: biodiesel, landfill gas (biomethanol), bioethanol and methanol. Much of the fuel that is being produced, or will be produced will be used for cars, trucks and fishing boats. Now, Iceland is not, obviously, planning to replace gasoline but simply offset need, by adding many of these fuels into their gasoline supply.
Iceland’s largest consulting engineering firm, Mannvit is working with the University of Akureyri on several research and development projects for landfill gas, biomethane & bioethanol and is working independently on a biodiesel plant designing a 450 TPY biodiesel plant.
