The Italian domestic pellet market is one of the largest and rapidly growing in Europe. Over the past 3 years in Italy has seen steady 15% increase in demand for pellets. It ranks third (0.77 million tons) among European pellet producers.
As the demand for pellets prevailed over production in Italy, the country has to import large volumes of pellets from abroad.
Sergei Kozlov, the analyst of Ukrainian Biofuel Portal pellets-wood.com, commented on the market situation: "Sea imports of wood pellet to Italy increased significantly in 2013, as private households burned 2.5 million tons of pellets. Italy is a prime example of effectiveness of renewable energy supporting policy conducted by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development. Thus, on December 28, 2012 the "Conto termico" law was passed, aimed at stimulating the renewable energy production, in particular biomass".
It is noteworthy to regard that according to the Conto termico, the total share of renewable energy should reach 17% of gross final energy consumption and heat production from biomass by 2020. Among the measures undertaken by the government should be noted: energy efficiency measures, measures aimed at stimulating heat generation (up to 1 MW) from renewable sources in high efficiency boilers. Thus, the owners of pellet boilers get a 65% tax reduction when installing a new boiler, and 50% tax reduction for construction work. In 2014 in Italy were recorded about 40 pellet plants, a distinctive feature of which was a slight remoteness from the raw material base. It should be noted that the pellet production within the country is stable enough and exceeded 200 thousand tons by the end of 2014.
Eventually high demand for wood pellets has led to the situation when Italian producers themselves import pellets from neighboring countries. In view of the above reasons, producers could import large volumes of pellets, but, ultimately, to meet the domestic demand for wood granules will be impossible in the country.
The growth in domestic production of Italian pellets is unlikely to happen in the coming years, not only because of the high cost of production and raw materials, but also the complexity to find good suppliers in the market, as well as the impossibility of producers to meet the growing demand. At the same time, according to forecasts, in 2015 the growth of pellet consumption will reach 3.3 million tons in Italy.
Author: Ivan Prokhorov
