🌲 Residual product from forestry becomes diesel

The Swedish company Colabitoil produces and sells HVO diesel from residual products from the forest industry. The company aims to develop the fossil-free fuels of the future, such as renewable gasoline and aviation fuel.

On Colabitoils website says that their range of products and services enable customers to reduce their carbon footprint. The company writes that since almost all commercial and transport vehicles have diesel engines, they can, as well as passenger cars with diesel engines, become fossil-free at the next refueling. Colabitoil was founded in 2013 based on the environmental problems of our time. The company wants to speed up the journey towards a 100 percent renewable society. Their mission is to enable this change for today's vehicles.  

Industrial doctoral student Shiromini Gamage, from Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall, is employed at Colabitoil in research and development. Together with Colabitoil, she has developed raw materials for HVO, which stands for Hydrated Vegetable Oil, which is a fossil-free diesel.

Through a collaboration with Mid Sweden University and a company called Gröna Pro, Colabitoil has been able to produce lipids, free fatty acids, by breaking down biomass with the help of microbes, Recycling writes in an article. The biomass used is a waste from forestry and is called fiber sludge.

In an interview with Recycling , Jan Nordlöf, Chairman of the Board of Colabitoil, says the following:

- The goal is to be able to commercialize free fatty acids from biomass in the process of producing fossil-free fuel, this is very gratifying and a major breakthrough in our work.

Hopefully, in the near future, we can refuel all cars powered by a diesel engine with HVO diesel and slowly move towards a 100 percent renewable society.