The interest for large-scale production of bioethanol is increasing, but full-scale plants are not yet a reality. However, pilot and demo plants are under construction at several locations in Europe and  the US. The complexity of the plants can be very different, but the goal is the same: to gather data for techno-economic calculations to estimate capital and operational costs for full-scale plants.

In the municipality of Sveg in Sweden, a pilot-plant is in operation. It is the first step in an intended biorefinery, based on an already existing pellet-production facility. In the biorefinery concept utilization of the raw material is paramount. Therefore, not only bioethanol will be produced, but also solid fuel (pellets), waste heat and carbon dioxide. The latter two will be used in greenhouse cultivation. The purpose is to optimize batch-wise dilute-acid hydrolysis and fermentation of various raw materials, e.g., pine, spruce and hemp. The capacity of the plant is 1/20 of a full-scale plant and an increase to production scale will be done by increasing the number of the already full-sized reactors.

Extensive investigations have been performed in laboratory scale, regarding hydrolysis and fermentation conditions. The results will be validated in the pilot-plant and, if necessary, the pilot reactor will be modified to find optimum large-scale conditions. In the biorefinery concept, the economics of the process is depending on a mixture of products; therefore, it is vital to gather data for all products to be used for techno-economic calculations. Results from the studies will  be presented.