Ethanolfabrikken Danmark, owned by RE Energy, produces emergency ethanol in Kalundborg, to secure sufficient supply of hand disinfectants, due to the current COVID-19 crisis. In no time production was established as a unique partnership with Ørsted, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Carlsberg and the Danish state. Now production is up and running, demonstrating how fast and efficient partners can act when the right resources are present.
Ethanol production generates waste water. In Kalundborg it amounts to the outlet of appr. 70.000 citizens, and even though Kalundborg Utility is resilient enough to handle the new stream, it was quite a challenge to run the right treatment. And why not use the residue, containing valuable organic material as an input to the production of biogas? The mindset of industrial symbiosis made director Hans-Martin Friis Møller from Kalundborg Utility to give the director of Kalundborg Bioenergy, Erik Lundsgaard a call and present the idea to him.
And then the ball started to roll; Erik Lundsgaard called his neighbor, Ethanolfabrikken Danmark, 300 meters up the road, and two days after the waste water was running in a huge water hose to the biogas plant. Instead of treating the waste water, it is now adding to biogas production, ending up at the natural gas grid as green energy.
Industrial symbiosis creates benefits for all:
- Ethanolfabrikken Danmark saves money on expensive waste water treatment
- Kalundborg Bioenergy gets a biomass supplement to their production at a fair price
- Kalundborg Utility saves extra capacity for other purposes, for instance new production facilities
- Reduction of CO2 amounts to appr. 300 tons for the temporary time (month of May)
When the emergency production of hand disinfectants stops, RE Energy plans to start its own ethanol production. And who knows, maybe a permanent agreement on waster water will make good sense and create another win-win situation in Kalundborg?
