The Luxembourg-based company Boson Energy is entering a new phase in its industrial development. The company has secured a basic engineering contract for an Australian waste-to-energy project representing an investment of around €150m.
The project involves converting 75,000 tonnes of residual waste per year into sustainable methanol and chemical feedstocks. The facility is set to use non-recyclable municipal, commercial and industrial waste, supplemented by wood waste. A second phase could then increase the total capacity to 150,000 tonnes per year.
Entry into an industrial phase
For Boson Energy, this is not simply a new commercial contract. It marks the company’s first concrete step into a phase of large-scale industrial engineering for its ‘waste-to-fuels’ approach. The contract secured by Boson is valued at between €3m and €4m, depending on the final scope of the project, and is expected to run until early 2027. It is part of Boson’s total potential project scope of up to €60M. Construction is scheduled for 2027, with commissioning planned for 2029. The project is being developed with the Australian companies Zerogen and Xseed Solutions, Boson Energy’s joint venture partners. The technology provided by Boson converts waste into hydrogen and CO2, prior to a synthesis step designed to produce methanol.
Beyond the fuel it produces, Boson highlights another issue that has become highly sensitive both politically and industrially: the destruction of persistent pollutants such as PFAS. Liran Dor, CTO and co-CEO of Boson Energy, explains that the high-temperature gasification process developed by the company is designed to eliminate these persistent chemicals, whereas landfills and certain forms of incineration continue to face major challenges in this regard.
But the real strategic issue lies in the much broader narrative put forward by the company regarding energy sovereignty. Boson now advocates the view that waste is an underutilised industrial resource capable of significantly reducing Europe’s dependence on imported fuels.
Waste accounts for 70% of kerosene consumption
According to the company’s estimates, the 200 million tonnes of waste still sent to landfill or incineration in the European Union could theoretically be used to produce up to 40 million tonnes of sustainable aviation fuel. This volume would represent around 70% of current kerosene consumption in the EU, whereas barely 3% of European aviation fuel is currently produced entirely locally. These fuels thus become, in Boson’s terminology, ‘sovereign aviation fuels’.
Jan Grimbrandt, CEO of Boson Energy, believes that converting waste into energy could radically alter the current industrial landscape. “The ability to transform these waste streams into competitive fuels that also offer geopolitical resilience fundamentally changes the equation,” he states in the press release.
Boson also advocates a modular industrial approach. The company aims to deploy smaller, replicable units, installed close to areas where waste is available and energy is consumed, rather than building only very large centralised sites. This industrial approach is reminiscent of trends already seen in the semiconductor and advanced polymers sectors, where the proliferation of more standardised parallel units has gradually replaced certain giant, highly specialised models. Boson states that it is already working with Siemens AG on the design of this modular system in order to accelerate its industrial roll-out.
For Luxembourg, the initiative also highlights the gradual emergence of a local technology player active in several areas that have simultaneously become strategic priorities: waste, energy, security of supply, industrial decarbonisation and alternative aviation fuels. The company also points out that it is participating in the Nato Diana defence acceleration programme, which focuses on dual-use technologies related to energy and security resilience.
