Baltic Energy Market Interconnection Plan GRIP 2017

The National Energy and Climate Strategy published in 2016 support the production and use of biogas by various means. The strategy states that target is to increase the production and use of biogas by influencing the EU-regulations and especially EU’s state support regulations so that it enables the supporting of biogas production. Also national regulations will be clarified so that they support the production and use of biogas. Production and use of biogas will receive incentives at least at the same level than earlier. The use of agriculture biomasses will be supported in biogas produc- tion. Biogas is mainly utilised at the moment as a local solution to produce heat and power, but increasingly, via the injection of upgraded biogas into the gas transmission system, it is possible to use biogas more widely. Biogas use has been increasing in the transportation, industry and heat production segments. In order to facilitate the market development, Gasum has introduced in 2013 a voluntary biogas certificate system, where the bio-component can be traded and used separately from the phys- ical biogas flow. Additionally, there are some plans to introduce biogas liquefaction facilities in order to have liquefied biogas that can be transported by using the same equipment as is used in LNG. In order to account biomass produced gas as a biogas, it has to fulfil the sustaina- bility requirements according to the EU and national requirements. The legislation is currently in revision while the new ILUC directive will be implemented. The state of Finland does not tax biogas currently as natural gas is taxed in order to incentiv- ise the use. In the transportation sector an obligation to include a minimum amount of biofuels in the total amount of transportation fuel distributed is used as an incen- tive to increase the biofuel use as well. Currently this distribution obligation is not applied to biogas. In the renewal of the national legislation, the incentives applied to biogas will be evaluated and possibly changed in the near future. Natural gas and biogas use in the transportation has been relatively low in Finland during past years and currently the number of cars using gas as a fuel is above 2,000. There are about 120 heavy duty vehicles using gas as fuel on top of the cars. The demand on heavy duty transportation is expected to increase rapidly. Gasum is currently implementing four LNG filling stations to Finland. The development is dependent mainly on availability of gas-fuelled cars and existence of sufficient amount of filling stations. The number of filling stations will be increased in the near future both in the gas grid area and offgrid locations based on natural gas, biogas and LNG. The promotion towards car importers to provide gas-fuelled models into the market is also in the focus. With this development it is expected that number of gas fueled cars will increase in the coming years. Currently the LNG market development in Finland happens mainly in offgrid areas in the western, middle and northern part of the country. The development of LNG infrastructure provides excellent support to market development, which is mainly in industry, energy production, ship bunkering and the transportation sectors. LNG will be mainly used to substitute other more expensive fuels like oil and propane. The expected LNG market growth in Finland is difficult to estimate, but it is expected to be in the range of 5–10TWh/a by 2020. Power-to-gas is the functional process of the conversion of electrical power into a gaseous energy carrier such as hydrogen or methane. It is an efficient technology for storing the exceeding energy in the form of methane for later use. There is national interest to utilise power-to-gas technology in Finland and the global devel- opments in power-to-gas technologies are closely followed.

BEMIP Gas Regional Investment Plan 2017 |

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