Being built by St1 Biofuels and co-located at a sawmill site, the facility will use sawdust from softwood as feedstock to produce cellulosic ethanol at commercial scale in regions having abundance of softwood, such as the Northern Hemisphere.
The process uses steam-explosion to open up sawdust’s cellulosic structures, followed by enzymatic hydrolysis to extract the sugars for ethanol fermentation.
The softwood comes from trees like pine that have needles instead of leaves.
Novozymes Biomass Conversion vice-president Sebastian Søderberg said: "It marks an important step for Finland and other countries around the world that have ample softwood supplies.
"Northern Europe has a large industrial sector based on forestry, and this opens up many possibilities.
"The biomass and specialist knowledge is available here, and the long-term political framework is in place in Finland, which all works together to enable the commercial production of cellulosic ethanol based on softwood."
The refinery construction is scheduled to commence in the second half of this year, and the production will begin in 2016.
The €40 plant will have an initial production capacity of 10 million liters (2.7 million gallons) of cellulosic ethanol per year, and can be scaled up to annual output of 50 to 100 million liters.
The North European Bio Tech -owned biorefinery construction will support Finland’s climate and energy strategy, which aims to increase the renewable energy share in transport up to 20% by 2020.
The plant production capacity will be leased to North European Oil Trade.
