The HZI Kompogas® plant currently being built in Jönköping represents best practice implementation of Sweden’s decarbonization strategy, generating biogas from organic waste and upgrading it to create a renewable fuel for carbon-free transportation. From December 2020 this facility will supply gas to a new CNG filling station. The contract to build this filling station has been awarded to Hitachi Zosen Inova BioMethan, a German subsidiary of the HZI Group.

The Kompogas® dry fermentation plant and downstream gas upgrading unit on the site of the Jönköping municipal landfill in Sweden are about to be commissioned. The facility will process up to 40,000 tonnes annually of green, kitchen and food waste, as well as organic substrates from industry and commerce, to create biogas. This will then be upgraded by membrane-based gas permeation to produce biogas-based compressed natural gas (bio-CNG), a sustainable, renewable vehicle fuel of the same quality as fossil natural gas.

HZI BioMethan had already been involved in this major project, having supplied the membrane unit. This involvement developed into a follow-up contract signed at the beginning of July, which HZI will be delivering in collaboration with its Scandinavian partner Nærenergie.

The spin-off job is to build a CNG filling station at the depot of a local waste management company in the Torsvik area of Jönköping, to be used primarily to rapidly refuel the company’s natural-gas powered waste collection trucks. Biomethane from the Kompogas® facility in Hult will be injected into transport containers and taken to and emptied into the filling station. The contract covers a booster compressor, the infrastructure for emptying the gas transport containers, and the fuelling equipment. The CNG filling station will be able to refuel up to four vehicles simultaneously with bio-CNG.

Part of the organic resources from which the waste management company will produce fuel for its own fleet will be delivered to the Kompogas® plant. Since the project is supported by the environmental authority’s Klimatklivet incentive programme, the filling station will be made available to all CNG-fuelled vehicles in the region. Fabio Dinale, Vice President Business Development at HZI emphasises the relevance of this project with a clear statement: “This lighthouse project is showing the future of renewable fuels. It will enable local transportation to be decarbonised even beyond the waste management company’s fleet, contributing to Sweden’s national climate strategy target of achieving carbon neutrality by 2045.”