The market for biogas
Today, about 4 TWh of biogas is used in Sweden, but then half of the gas used is imported, something that is caused by distorted competition between different countries, and which you want to address through the proposed subsidies in the Biogas Market Inquiry (More biogas - for a sustainable Sweden, SOU 2019: 63). To put things in perspective, 10 GWh TWh corresponds to the capacity from 5,000 CryoSep from Biofrigas, which has a capacity of 2 GWh of liquid biogas. The Swedish production today comes from five different groupings according to the table below. A large part of the production goes to producing electricity and heat, and here we see clear interest from, above all, farmers to want to switch to liquid biogas, which is considered to be a much more attractive commercial value. Both municipal sewage treatment plants and co-digestion plants have also expressed a clear interest in starting to produce liquefied gas. Just over 10% (235 GWh) of the capacity produced is flared (fired up) for various reasons, but with the right planning could have been converted to liquid biogas in 118 CryoSep. Most of today's biogas producers as above are addressable customers of Biofrigas who could add production of liquid biogas to their range instead of producing electricity, heat or being forced to burn it.
There are 282 producers of biogas in Sweden today, but the total potential is estimated to be about 9 times as large with about 2,500 addressable facilities in Sweden. Of these, about 1,400 farms with a size are interesting for Biofrigas. In Europe, there are currently about 18,000 plants that produce, of which about 11,000 are in Germany. Of the 2,111 GWh of gas produced in 2019, only a few percent were processed into liquid biogas, but we see that this figure has increased and will increase sharply in the coming years for consumption in heavy transport, industry and vehicles. An interesting detail in this context is that Destination Gotland in February 2021 announced that it has increased the mixture of liquid biogas in its two gas ferries to 10% and has set the target of 30% by 2030. To produce that amount of liquid biogas would require about 30 CryoSep today or about 90 facilities by 2030. A filling station for liquefied vehicle gas should, in order to be commercially interesting, sell at least the gas that about 10 CryoSep can produce and with local customers, therefore, circular cycles can be closed.