Sweden cuts the crap

On one day at the beginning of October 2009 in Örebro, in southern Sweden, 61 brand new biogas-driven buses rolled into town. At the same time a new hundred-berth bus depot opened and local biogas production increased by four hundred per cent when Swedish Biogas International opened the country’s biggest biogas production plant in Örebro.

This was no biogas-busting coincidence. It was part of an overarching scheme to increase the production and use of biogas in the region and make public transport cleaner and more attractive.

Nothing new
MindsinMotion.net spoke to Tomas Bergkvist, planning officer at the Örebro municipality’s Climate Office, about the multi-million euro investment that brings together the public sector, private companies, local farmers and the general public.

“The driving force behind it all is to reduce vehicle emissions by forty per cent between 2000 and 2020,” says Tomas, who has been a planning officer for the municipality for the past six years.

But why biogas? Well, Tomas says, biogas is nothing new to Örebro. The municipality has been providing the University Hospital of Örebro with biogas derived from slurry at a local sewage treatment plant for years.

However, more importantly, for the past two years biogas-powered vehicles have been able to refuel using locally-produced biogas. In 2007, a plant was developed that upgraded the quality of the biogas from the treatment plant – through a cleaning and concentration process – to make it suitable for vehicles.

Deadlock
Tomas says it’s no secret that the biggest hurdle facing people involved in biogas and other future fuels is whether you build the filling stations first or introduce the vehicles initially.

To explain this, instead of using the tired chicken or the egg imagery, let’s spread our (chicken) wings and embrace modernity. In computer programming, one piece of code can sometimes depend on the output from another, but that code itself needs the result from the first. This creates a deadlock and is called circular referencing. It’s the same with filling stations and vehicles: neither is sustainable without the other.

Big spenders
So how did the municipality overcome this deadlock? It spent a tonne of money, that’s how. Forty million Euros (SEK 400 million), to be precise. It invested in upgrading the biogas production plant, in pipelines, a compression station, a new bus depot and the biogas municipal buses. All in one swoop.

“We replaced all 61 diesel-powered buses with new biogas-driven buses and next year we will be launching even more routes. Moreover, we will try to make the routes faster by introducing a lower speed limit for the city traffic,” says Tomas.

The municipality was not the only entity reaching into its pockets. Swedish Biogas International spent SEK 80 million on the new plant and SEK 20 million on back up, storage and compressors.

More, more, more
There are more plans for the future. There is room for the bus depot to expand even further and regional buses will soon also be powered by biogas. Surely that’s enough? Of course not.

“There’s still lots to do, we want to get the local farmers to produce biogas from manure, we want to use ‘non-cultivated’ bio mass, such as weed from wet lands and organic waste from households, and we want to expand the regional market with production plants and filling stations,” says Tomas.

That’s what we like to see, ambition that’s backed up by positive actions. No bullshit in sight. Well, maybe a little.