CENTRE FOR PROMOTION OF CLEAN AND EFFICIENT ENERGY IN ROMANIA
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BIO-EAST
 
 

 

 

 

The project BIO-EAST, co-financed by the European Commission within the programme ALTERENR, intends to identify the potential to produce raw materials for biofuel production, and also to promote the production, use and export of biofuels. The project coordinator is EXERGIA – Greece. ENERO is one of the other 4 partners to the project. The European Commission adopted a Directive (2003/30/EC) that sets national indicative targets for the use of biofuels in the road transport sector. Specifically, the indicative targets are:

  • 2% of fuels consumed in transport (energy content) should be from biofuels by 2005
  • 0.75% per year increase in the use of biofuels in transport
  • 5.75% in 2010
ARomania should transpose this Directive within the negotiation chapter no.14 Energy.
For fuels produced from biomass, various conversion routes are available that follow from the different types of biomass feedstocks.

These routes include direct conversion processes such as extraction of vegetable oils followed by esterification (biodiesel), fermentation of sugar-rich crops (ethanol), pyrolysis of wood (pyrolysis oil derived diesel equivalent), and HydroThermalUpgrading (HTU) of wet biomass (HTU oil derived diesel equivalent).

Another possibility is to produce liquid biofuels (methanol, DME, Fischer-Tropsch liquids) from synthesis gas, which results from gasification of biomass.

Most of these biofuels will not be commercially available on the short term. Although insights on technological and cost developments and the expected commercial availability of these biofuels are changing continuously, it can be stated that these biofuels will probably not be produced and applied on a commercial scale before 2010.

Currently, only ethanol (and its derivative ETBE) produced from food crops and biodiesel (mainly Rapeseed Methyl Ester, RME) are applied on a commercial basis on the European market.

They will remain the dominant biofuels in the coming decade, as alternative biofuel technologies are still in the development stage. Since the beginning of the 1990s, European biofuel production, taken as a whole, has undergone very sustained and buoyant growth.

Today there are produced in EU about 1.4 millions tone biodiesel and 0.4 millions tone bioethanol. The market has a continuous growth. Producing biofuels may be a real opportunity for Romania and an alternative to the agriculture restructuring and use of abandoned land.

Rape, sugar beet, or sweet sorghum may be the raw material for a production of biodiesel and ethanol. A non sophisticated technology is the production of biodiesel from crude rape oil. An output of 2,500 kg rape seed/ha, gives 900 kg crude oil which may fuel Diesel engines. The Biofuel Association in Romania is an active partner to ENERO, to promote biofuels on the Romanian market.