Industry News Neste to invest in Singapore N


este Corporation has made the final investment decision on additional renewable products


production capacity in Singapore. The decision is based on a growing global market demand for low-carbon solutions in transport and cities, aviation, polymers and chemicals. The investment worth


approximately EUR 1.4 billion will extend Neste’s renewable product overall capacity in Singapore by up to 1.3 million tons per annum, bringing the total renewable product capacity close to 4.5 million tons annually in 2022. The company’s target is to start up the new production line during the first half of 2022. “Neste is in the business of helping


transport and cities, aviation, polymers and chemicals customers make their business more sustainable and will continue to lead the way for renewable products. We are already a global leader in renewable products produced from waste and residues. This investment marks an important step in the execution of our profitable growth strategy globally,” says Peter Vanacker, President and CEO of Neste.


As a result of the investment,


Neste will have more options to choose between different product solutions in the whole production system. In addition to producing renewable diesel, all Neste’s renewable product refineries are


capabilities and enhanced raw material pretreatment for the use of increasingly low-quality waste and residue raw materials also for the existing refinery. “The investment will strengthen


Peter Vanacker, President and CEO of Neste.


able to produce renewable aviation fuel and raw materials for various polymers and chemicals materials. The investment in Singapore will include additional logistics


our competitive advantages which are based on the global optimization of our production and waste and residue raw material usage. With our proprietary NEXBTL technology, renewable products can be refined flexibly from a wide variety of lower quality waste and residues while the end-products retain their high quality. We will leverage the experience gained at our existing sites in Singapore, Rotterdam, the Netherlands and


Porvoo, Finland, and thanks to our continuous process and technology development, the new production line will be the best in class worldwide,” Vanacker continues. Neste currently has a renewable


products production capacity of 2.7 million tons annually. Of this total, over one million is produced in Singapore, the same amount in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and the rest in Porvoo, Finland. Before the new production line in Singapore, we will continue eliminating bottlenecks in our existing production, bringing the existing capacity to 3 million tons by 2020. More information: www.neste.sg


Crustacean key to breaking down lignin for biofuels


According to the University of York, scientists who have been studying the digestive system of a wood-eating crustacean have recently discovered that it may have the answer to sustainably converting wood into biofuel. Small marine invertebrates, Gribble


have evolved to perform an important ecological role eating the large amount of wood that has been washed into the sea from river estuaries. Until now, the way Gribble break through lignin has been unknown. The sea creatures are remarkably able to find a way through the extremely resistant coating that


2 Forest Bioenergy Review Spring 2019


wraps around the sugar polymers that compose wood. Led by the University of York, a


team of scientists have studied the hind gut of gribble and discovered that hemocyanins are vital to how the crustaceans extract sugars from wood. hemocyanins are also the same proteins that make the blood of invertebrates blue. The discovered proteins are part of a group that are better known for their role in transporting oxygen in invertebrates in a similar way to haemoglobin in animals. Gribbles appear to have harnessed the oxidative capabilities of


hemocyanins to break the lignin bonds that bind the wood together. The scientists explain that this is because oxygen is highly reactive. This recent discovery has meant that


researchers are even closer to being able to identify a cheaper and more sustainable way to convert wood into low carbon fuel. This would make for a promising alternative to fossil such as coal and oil. The research was carried out by


teams from the Universities of York, Portsmouth, Cambridge and Sao Paulo. It concluded that treating wood with hemocyanins enables almost double


the amount of sugar to be released, whilst more expensive and energy consuming thermochemical pre- treatments release exactly the same amount. The University of York’s Professor Simon McQueen-Mason from the Department of Biology and leader of the research team said that, “Gribble are the only animal known to have a sterile digestive system. This makes their method for wood digestion easier to study than that of other wood- consuming creatures such as termites, which rely on thousands of gut microbes to do the digestion for them.”


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