Your choices:
1 Process heat (> 1000 °C); 2 Fuel: solid; Biomass (solid)
| What is your resource? | What do you want to deliver? | What is the service the customer wants? |
| Biomass (digestible sludge) | District cooling | Comfortable indoor climate |
| Biomass (fermentable sludge) | District heating | Electricity |
| Biomass (solid) | Electricity | Process cooling (< 0 °C) |
| Geothermal | Fuel: Gaseous | Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C) |
| Sunshine | Fuel: Liquid | Process heat (150 - 1000 °C) |
| Water | 2 Fuel: Solid | 1 Process heat (> 1000 °C) |
| Wind | Local cooling (ind. house) | Transport |
| Residual oils/fats etc | Local heating (ind. house) |
Some processes, such as the large scale production of container glass in glass tanks or steel reheating prior to rolling, will have a large number of burners mounted in the main furnace and these burners need be controlled group-wise. For solid biomass to be an attractive fuel in such applications the first criterion will be that not every single burner has to be equipped with a complicated and expensive solid-fuel feeding system. Therefore, pulverised fuel or pellet firing will be out of question for such large-scale installations.
Some processes, such as the small scale production of art glass in pot furnaces or the burning and glazing of ceramics in small-scale or handicraft applications, will, however, only have a single burner mounted in the main furnace and the main temperature control will be done changing the load only on that burner.
Though each installation in this case will be small, the number of such installations throughout Europe is large.
For applications like these, wood pellet burners would be the preferred choice. Commercial wood pellet burners are available in sizes from 15 up to 500 kW, hoppers and feeding systems are available in a number of sizes and pellets are available basically anywhere in Europe.
If briquettes or chips would be selected for these applications there would be a need for major reconstructions of the furnaces and this would probably not be a realistic alternative.
In larger scale, cement or calcining kilns also have only one burner and would be well suited for direct firing of pulverised biomass powder. In Sweden, there are already several examples of bark-powder firing in calcining furnaces at pulp mills.