Energía y Celulosa (Ence) purchased recently the controlling share in two Spanish biomass power plants: Endesa’s Enemasa facility in Ciudad Real, and a Enel’s La Loma plant in Jaen. 

Enemansa and La Loma power plants have a total power of 32 MW and will reach an estimated net production of 175 million kWh in 2016. Ence decided to purchase 68% stake in Endesa’s Enemasa facility in Ciudad Real, and a 64% share in Enel’s La Loma plant in Jaen, what gives it full control over these two companies.

This transaction will allow Ence to increase by 29% the installed capacity of its power business, which now reaches 143 MW.

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Ence’s Vice President and CEO, Ignacio Colmenares, said about this transaction:

“This operation constitutes a new step in fulfilling our Strategic Plan, which plans to achieve 383 MW of installed capacity in biomass generation by 2020. We expect to achieve rapid synergies in all our power plants after the operation materialized, thanks to our knowledge and management capacity of agricultural and forestry biomass, technology of which we are leaders in Spain.”

Ence is Spain’s market leader in the production of renewable energy using forest biomass and energy crop. Ence co-generates the electricity and heat required for its industrial operations and sells its surplus production to the national grid. To do this, Ence uses biomass from two main sources as its raw material:

•Wood bark (solid biomass) and forest residues.

•Black liquor, resulting from the wood cooking process, goes through a chemical recovery process and they are reused again in the cooking process.

In addition, Ence is the leading producer of eucalyptus pulp in Europe with a capacity of 930ktpa and is the second company by sales on the continent.

Main photo credit: Rafal Chudy