Finland: The deployment of biomethane in the Finnish transport sector hampered by limited amount of gas vehicles
A report on different scenarios and their cost-efficiency in reducing national transport emissions by 40% by 2030.
The most cost-efficient scenario to reduce transport emissions would be to invest in domestic drop-in fuels and biomethane but the use of gas in the transport sector is limited by the slow increase of gas vehicles. The report prepared by VTT estimates that by 2030, there could be around 50,000 passenger cars, 6,000 vans and 1,200 heavy duty vehicles fuelled by methane in Finland. Altogether, their fuel consumption would be around 50,000 toe/a. The biomethane production is not limited by the amount of available feedstock; 50,000 toe/a could be reached by anaerobic digestion and more could come from wood-based SNG that however competes for the feedstock with liquid drop-in fuels. CNG and LNG would not bring enough CO2 emission reductions. At the moment there are 24 fuelling stations providing gas, 18 of them are operated by Gasum.
Finland is driving the decarbonisation in a technology-neutral manner, therefore there are no incentives to increase the amount of gas vehicles. This is the main barrier since there is a lot of feedstock potential: around 15-23 TWh/a (1.3 – 2.0 ktoe) of waste, manure, crops and wood waste.
The most cost-efficient way to decarbonise, according to the report’s findings, is to produce enough biomethane to cover the consumption of all gas vehicles in use but the biggest emission reduction would be carried out by domestically produced biodiesel and ethanol.
Source: VTT report (in Finnish)
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