Advanced BioFuels USA

by Caitlin Kelly (Neste)  … A road warrior who has managed projects in more than 30 countries, Ervasti is clearly a global adventurer, a leader not easily rattled. In her groundbreaking and highly innovative role at Neste, she’s now building a team of visionaries like herself, people of all ages and backgrounds as eager as she is to create a cleaner, more efficient and more sustainable way to mitigate climate change. The team is developing uses for renewable hydrogen and an exciting new solution to help produce renewable energy called power-to-X.

As Ervasti explains, the power-to-X technologies enable the conversion of renewable electricity into hydrogen, other fuels and even chemicals, helping to solve the dilemma of storage of renewable electricity. The key technology is electrolysis, where hydrogen is produced from water using electricity by splitting water molecules. When using electricity from renewable sources, such as wind or solar power, the technology can be used to produce renewable hydrogen.
 
Interest towards power-to-X solutions is vast, since the technology can enable us to convert fully to renewable energy, with minimal changes to existing transport, heating and industrial infrastructures. And by using industrial CO2 emissions as feedstock, power-to-x technologies can help turn a problem into a solution.
 
Renewable hydrogen shows additional promise as well. “Hydrogen is used in large quantities in many industries, e.g. oil refineries to process fuels. A common way to produce hydrogen has been to produce it from natural gas and water in high temperatures. This produces, in addition to hydrogen, also carbon dioxide, so it has led to carbon emissions.” By using renewable hydrogen made with electrolysis instead of hydrogen made of natural gas it’s possible to avoid considerable CO2 emissions, so a direct environmental benefit.
 
But in addition, renewable hydrogen is also seen as a fuel itself. “There’s potential in heavy duty transport,” Ervasti adds.

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“I network with people from other Neste business units so I am not working in a silo,” Ervasti says. “In a big company [Neste has 4,400 employees] you have to network to get things done, to produce. Production of renewable hydrogen and synthetic fuels are still in a pre-commercialization phase, so in addition to technology experts I also need business development people who can envision opportunities and not only risks. This is what you need when you build the future.”
 
Heavy monetary investments are necessary to develop the sustainable solutions of the future. “You have to buy the entry ticket – invest in R&D, start the pilot plans and build demonstration plants. These are expensive endeavors, and it takes time, maybe another decade, for the applications to develop to enable cost-competitive production to mass-market. But I think both time and money are well spent here.”
 
One of these projects, in a pilot phase, is the production of renewable hydrogen in a Neste manufacturing plant in Rotterdam, a project Neste is conducting together with Sunfire, Paul Wurth, Engie and CEA.

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In the renewable hydrogen and power-to-x business landscape, new types of value chains and global cooperation networks are forming. “I am working on screening cooperation possibilities with other industry players”, Ervasti says. It is not only about finding potential partnerships for Neste, she needs to ‘build ecosystems between companies and the public sector’, where companies find each other and find ways to build and develop these technologies and solutions together. READ MORE

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