Green methanol now comes out of a Danish plant, “a spectacular breakthrough”

In the Danish countryside, a new chapter in the history of the fuel industry is being written, according to the Danish press. It was there, in Kasso, a municipality in the southwest of the country, that “the world's first large-scale plant producing green e-methanol fuel” was inaugurated on Tuesday, May 13, for commercial use, proclaims the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten .

Operating mainly thanks to a huge adjoining solar park, the plant is expected to produce, through a complex technological process, some 42,000 tonnes per year of this “climate-friendly liquid fuel,” the newspaper's special correspondent explains.

The carbon footprint of the e-methanol produced in this way is “reduced by 97% compared to fossil-based products,” claims the Danish company European Energy, which owns 51% of the plant (the rest belonging to the Japanese company Mitsui), on its website .

Among those invited to the May 13 inauguration were representatives of three Danish companies that have already signed agreements to purchase the green fuel. Mærsk, the world's second-largest shipping company, will use it for some of its latest-generation container ships, one of which "refueled" on Monday at a port 10 kilometers away, according to the Copenhagen daily Politiken .

Ultimately, e-methanol "will also be used to produce more environmentally friendly plastic" that Lego will use for its toys and the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk for its insulin pens, adds the Danish news agency Ritzau, quoted by the Danish website Berlingske .

While the Kasso site's production capacity remains very small (for comparison, Mærsk will need 1 million tonnes in 2030), its owners are already working on a second plant. "We will decide where to put it within six months," Knud Erik Andersen, founder of European Energy, told Jyllands-Posten, without ruling out a location abroad.

After years of skepticism about so-called “Power-to-X” technologies that convert renewable electricity into other forms of energy carriers, the “breakthrough” achieved by the Kasso site “is something to be proud of,” says Professor Soren Linderoth of the Energy Department at the Danish University of Technology. “It’s an important and spectacular step,” he even states in Politiken .

With this new factory, Jyllands-Posten points out, “Knud Erik Andersen has taken a first step in the fight against the Chinese, who are determined to establish themselves on the global market for liquid green fuels.”