In Japan, Nippon Paper Industries and Mitsubishi have agreed to establish Nippon Paper Ishinomaki Energy Center, an electric power generation company that will build and operate a renewable power plant using a combination of biomass and coal in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture. The new company will set up the electric power generation facility on the Hibarino site owned... [Read More]

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has reported that, in 2014, almost 75% of all US wood pellet exports were delivered to the UK, mainly for the purpose of generating electricity. Overall, US wood pellet exports increased by nearly 40% between 2013 and 2014, from 3.2 million tonnes to 4.4 million tonnes, as the US continues to be the largest wood pellet exporter... [Read More]

SBP has announced that a further four Certification Bodies have been accepted as applicants and are now able to progress towards achieving SBP-approved status. The applicant Certification Bodies are: Forest Certification, KPMG Performance Registrar, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and SGS. The SBP Framework of standards and processes enables producers of woody biomass to... [Read More]

Drax's biomass pellet storage, handling and loading facilities at the Port of Greater Baton Rouge are now complete and receiving pellets daily. The first biomass pellets to pass through the facility have now been loaded onto the MV TBC Princess. This first vessel, which arrived on 19 April, forms part of the commissioning process, enabling Drax to test its ship loading... [Read More]

Blue Sphere, a clean energy company that develops, manages and owns waste-to-energy projects, has closed a joint venture with an affiliate of York Capital Management to develop, construct and operate a 3.2MW biogas generation facility in Johnston, Rhode Island under the management of Entropy Investment Management. Under the terms of the JV, Blue Sphere owns 22.75% of the... [Read More]

Following an order placed in March 2013, Siwertell, part of Cargotec, has delivered, installed and commissioned two Siwertell ship unloaders at ABP's port of Immingham, UK. Manufactured and assembled in Italy, the type ST790-D screw type unloaders are equipped with slewable gantry tail conveyors. They will be used to discharge wood pellets and coal to supply the Drax power... [Read More]

Energia Reino Verde (ERV) has signed an agreement for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) supervision of the 12MW biomass power plant that will be co-located with the 834 hectare (2,060 acre) Giant King Grass (GKG) plantation project in Nicaragua. Viaspace owns a 50% interest in ERV, the special-purpose company that will own and operate the project. The... [Read More]

Albioma has signed final documentation relating to the acquisition of a 65% equity interest in Codora Energia, which owns a 48MW bagasse-fired cogeneration plant in the Brazilian state of Goiás. The plant, commissioned in 2011, backs onto a distillery that currently processes 1.6 million tonnes of sugarcane annually. The distillery is owned by Jalles Machado, the... [Read More]

Shortly after the acquisition by its new owner Hitachi Zosen Inova AG, Hitachi Zosen Inova BioMethan (HZIB) has received an order to build a biogas upgrading plant in Wittenburg, Germany. The agreement was signed last week between HZIB and the client, Munich-based Landwärme. The project comprises a plant with capacity to upgrade 700Nm3/hr of raw biogas, delivering... [Read More]

NexSteppe, a producer of sustainable feedstock solutions for the bio-based industries, sold more than 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) of its Palo Alto biomass sorghums in Brazil this past growing season, compared to just over 1,000 hectares in the previous year. Just as many of the leaders of the bio-based economy have begun proving their conversion technologies at commercial... [Read More]

Sappi Southern Africa CEO Alex Thiel has welcomed the announcement that Ngodwana Energy has been chosen as a preferred bidder in the Department of Energy's 4th window Renewable Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (REIPPPP). The Ngodwana Energy project is situated in the Mpumalanga Province on the Sappi Ngodwana Mill Site and will feed electricity into the... [Read More]

HoSt, a European supplier of bioenergy systems, has received an order of €20 million from Croatian electricity company HEP to build two wood-fired combined heat and power (CHP) plants. The biomass plants will supply 3MWe of electricity to the grid. The residual heat generated will be supplied to the district heating networks in the cities of Sisak and Osijek. The... [Read More]

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it will finalise the volume requirements for the 2014, 2015 and 2016 Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), in addition to the 2017 volume requirement for biomass-based diesel, by 30 November. The following schedule has been established following a proposed consent decree in litigation brought against EPA by the American Petroleum... [Read More]

After 35 years of service, Viridor's Ardley landfill site in Oxfordshire, UK will no longer be taking hazardous waste. From now on, non-hazardous waste will now be taken into Viridor's adjacent energy recovery facility (ERF). The £205 million (€283 million) facility has capacity to treat 300,000 tonnes per year of waste – sufficient to treat all of Oxfordshire's... [Read More]

According to UNEP's ninth 'Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2015', prepared by the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate and Sustainable Energy Finance and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Bloomberg New Energy Finance — the past year brought a rebound of green energy investments worldwide... [Read More]

DRT, a company working to develop rosin and turpentine extracted from pine trees, says that commissioning has begun at its biomass cogeneration power plant in Vielle-Saint-Girons, France. The cogeneration plant is being developed by Biomass Energy Solutions VSG – a venture between DRT, Cofely (GDF Suez Group) and the Caisse des Dépôts. Following a four-month... [Read More]