2. Do you feel that your thesis brought the debate forward? In what way?
Yes, I think so. Politicians are accustomed to seeing the fuel issue in a broader perspective, but for the industry my thesis may have contributed to some “Aha" moments. In particular it is the effect of the realization that the quantity of bioenergy that can be produced from the limited surface of the planet will not be sufficient to replace all fossil fuels which leads to deliberations over which bioenergy sector will be of most benefit. It is not clear that biofuels for passenger cars is the most cost effective solution for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

3. Western Sweden is pressing the biogas issue strongly, is biogas well placed among the various fuel alternatives?
Biogas from the anaerobic digestion of various types of waste (especially manure) is found in most comparative “well-to-wheel" analyses to be the fuel that achieves the best values when it comes to benefiting the climate. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) we do not have so much waste in the world that we can replace all uses of gasoline and diesel with landfill gas.  From an energy system perspective, it becomes a slightly more complicated to assess the climate benefit of growing wheat or other crops in order to increase the amount of substrate and so be able to scale up the production of biogas. Then you need to analyze whether soil where the wheat was grown could have been used in a different way (e.g. cultivating cellulose-rich plants) which could possibly have reduced carbon dioxide further. What is interesting at the moment is to follow the evolution of the production of biomethane via the gasification of wood raw materials.

4. What proportion of our fuels will be renewable in 2020?
The EU has set a target that 10% of all fuel used in the transport sector should be renewable (renewable electricity, renewable hydrogen or biofuels). Since Sweden can include the electricity used for railways it is a lot easier for us to meet this target than many other EU countries. As regards the road transport sector the use of biofuels (both in low proportions and new fuels) has increased in recent years. Currently a large amount of biofuels is imported into Sweden, but with higher demand coming from other countries, it is very difficult to know if we can count on continued large imports. In work that Julia Hansson and I have carried out we have studied the possibilities for the domestic production of renewable fuels to 2030, and if all plants that are currently planned are be built as planned, then approximately 10 TWh of biofuels will be produced in Sweden in 2020. This represents about 10% of the road transport sector´s energy use.

5. You have left Chalmers and are now at SP, the Technical Research Institute of Sweden - what are you doing now?
I am a researcher and project manager at SP Energy Technology, Systems Analysis, and doing the same things as I did at Chalmers. All research is related to resource and fuel issues. It´s a question of analyzing the issues in an energy system perspective. What is new at SP is that I have come closer to waste issues where there are many interesting considerations to analyze from a resource and climate perspective. Should the waste (and if so at which fractions) be digested into biogas, incinerated or gasified for electricity and heat production?