The sugar factory in Nakskov is closing, and the gas pipeline to Lolland-Falster is being called a fiasco. But the pipe is paid for, it runs through the farmland with the most to put into it — and it was designed from the outset to carry gas the other way for eight months of the year.
By Rose-Marie Nielsen, MD, Arne Nielsen A/S
On Tuesday, Nordzucker announced that the sugar factory in Nakskov will close once the current beet campaign ends in January 2027. 144 years, up to 150 jobs, and all Danish sugar production consolidated in Nykøbing Falster. The reason is not Lolland. It is structural overcapacity in the European sugar industry, and Nordzucker is closing elsewhere too.
The same day, the verdict came down on the gas pipeline: 115 kilometres from Everdrup to Nakskov, approved in 2021 with Nordic Sugar’s two factories as the main justification, budgeted at 792 million kroner and finished at one and a half billion. The climate minister calls it not a good decision — an example of infrastructure that does not belong to the future. Brian Vad Mathiesen, professor of energy planning at Aalborg University, calls the economics a catastrophe and the stretch out to Nakskov a dead-end spur. Hans Henrik Lindboe of the consultancy Ea Energianalyse, who warned against the pipe back in 2021, calls it a poisoned gift from the state.
At the same time, the business minister explained to EnergiWatch that the government’s goal of ending Denmark’s gas consumption as quickly as possible is not the same as ending Danish gas extraction in the North Sea. So gas may be brought up from the seabed and sold abroad. It just must not be brought up from Lolland’s fields and sent to Zealand — that pipe does not belong to the future.
Since then, Lidegaard’s party has put its otherwise pointed criticism of North Sea extraction on pause. The Social Liberals still do not want to extend the licences beyond 2042, but TotalEnergies has asked to keep extracting gas from the Tyra field — Denmark’s largest gas field — all the way to 2050, and the government is now weighing the question in terms of economics, security of supply and climate. No decision has been made. “Being in government means making compromises,” says Lidegaard. Agreed. This piece merely asks for the same compromise for the green gas.
On Tuesday evening, DR asked the right question: what do you do with expensive infrastructure when the thing it was built for disappears? The criticism is understandable. The answer — writing the pipe off — is still wrong.
The pipe was judged by its customer
The criticism is right on its own premise: a pipe built for one customer’s boilers dies with the customer. As late as autumn 2024, Nordic Sugar was the only company connected, although the ministry had spoken of 15-20 interested firms. And everything that was hung on the factory now falls with it. In October, the local district heating company, Lolland Varme, inaugurated a system that recovers up to 10 MW of surplus heat from sugar processing and covers all of Nakskov’s heat demand in September and October. It will get two seasons. Then it is back to 5,000 bales of straw a year.
That is the lesson: you do not future-proof a region on one customer.
The bill, however, does not leave with the customer. The pipeline is financed through tariffs, so it is the country’s roughly 300,000 household gas customers and 30-40,000 businesses who pay it off over the coming years — whatever flows in the pipe. And they will be there longer than planned: in a new report, KL, the association of Danish municipalities, finds that Denmark will not reach the 2035 target for phasing out gas boilers under the current framework. That is the billion-kroner bill DR writes about. The question is not whether it gets paid. It is whether those who pay get anything for their money.
They can. Because a pipe is not a factory. It is a connection between the national gas system and a farming region with more biomass than it can use — and gas can flow both ways.
The gas comes out of the ground on Lolland
In April, Nysted Bioenergi near Kettinge became the first biogas plant on the line. It processes 100,000 tonnes of biomass a year, from local farms and from sugar production, and can deliver 8.5 million cubic metres of gas — the consumption of 3,000 houses. Note how Evida, the state gas distributor, describes it: via the compressor station, the gas can either supply businesses on Lolland-Falster or be sent on to the grid on southern Zealand. Evida also has an agreement with a second plant.
This is not hindsight. The pipe is officially called Grøn Gas Lolland-Falster — Green Gas Lolland-Falster — and Energinet and Evida’s own application to the Environmental Protection Agency from March 2020 states the premise in black and white: the sugar factories use gas from September to January, the biogas plants produce all year, and the pipeline is there to balance the two. Gas was expected to flow towards Lolland-Falster four months a year — and towards southern Zealand the other eight. The project was to be green from the start: local biogas was to cover at least half of local consumption. In other words, the pipe was not merely built so that it could be turned around. It was designed to run in reverse eight months of the year.
Nature Energy is building a plant at Abed for around 400,000 tonnes of biomass and just over 20 million cubic metres of gas, expected in operation this year.
And the farmers have started themselves. Lolland-Falster Bioenergi — half owned by local farms, half by Danish Agro — has the financing in place for a plant costing more than half a billion kroner: 400-500,000 tonnes of biomass from some 70 farms and 55-60 million cubic metres of gas a year. It lacks one thing: a site. The company has now been turned down twice, most recently at Holeby in July, and is looking again.
Then there was the largest of them all: Biofuel Technology’s straw-based plant at Stensø south of Nakskov — 475 million kroner, 170 jobs, and on paper a capacity equal to the other three planned plants combined. Lolland-Falster has one of the largest straw surpluses in the country, and the founder himself named the gas pipeline as the precondition for building. The company was sold to Green2x in July, and the plans have been pushed into the future.
Add up what is running, what is being built and what has the money: around 85 million cubic metres a year, without the straw plant. All of Denmark fed 653 million cubic metres of biogas into the grid in 2025. Lolland-Falster alone could add an eighth on top. And the pipeline is built for up to 290 million cubic metres a year, so there is room. Business Lolland-Falster’s own arithmetic is that this is three to four times the islands’ own consumption, with the sugar factories deducted — and now one factory’s consumption is gone as well.
And the trend is not local: in August, biogas covered 82 per cent of Denmark’s total gas consumption, and this year the plants have already produced what all Danish households use in the whole of 2026.
Henrik Høegh said it at the inauguration in 2024: this is not just a pipe to Lolland-Falster, it is a pipe from Lolland-Falster, meant to deliver biogas to the rest of the country outside the sugar season. He was right. Just sooner than anyone wished.
And the electricity the island cannot get rid of
There is one more step. Lolland produces far more electricity from wind and sun than the island uses itself, and the connection to Zealand has been a bottleneck for years. The biogas plants also deliver biogenic CO2 — the feedstock Power-to-X lacks. Hydrogen from the surplus power plus CO2 from the plants gives methane, and methane can go into the pipe, be stored and be used when it is needed. Bigadan itself mentions the possibility of a PtX plant at Nysted.
The pipe then becomes the export connection the power grid cannot offer: a way of getting Lolland’s energy to the rest of the country that does not depend on when the wind blows.
What it takes
Five things. None of them expensive against what has already been spent.
1. Say it out loud. From now on, the pipe’s purpose is the export of green gas from Lolland-Falster — as the 2020 application already assumed. Evida and Energinet should plan compressor capacity and tariffs on the basis that the gas flows north, so producers know what they can deliver.
2. Find a site for the farmers’ plant. 55-60 million cubic metres a year, financed and ready, has now been refused twice, most recently in July. Nobody wants a biogas plant in the back garden, and that is understandable. But a one-and-a-half-billion-kroner pipe lying half empty while the largest plant looks for a plot is a more expensive neighbour.
3. Use the Nakskov end. The spur only makes sense if gas comes in at that end. The straw plant at Stensø was conceived exactly that way; it now sits with Green2x, waiting for better times. It should be brought back. And the port of Nakskov lies at the end of the pipe — Lolland-Falster Bioenergi itself plans to be able to deliver biomethane as liquefied gas, the fuel that goes into lorries and ships today.
4. Give the companies that never came a reason to come. In 2021 there were agreements with five companies and interest from 15 more. Most stayed away, and local businesses themselves point out that the price of connecting has multiplied since. With green gas at the source and a connection price that can be planned on, connecting is not a fossil bet. For most, it is a burner change.
5. Put the new power-hungry customers at the end of the pipe. Since spring 2025, more than ten data centres have asked about the gas grid, because the queue for the electricity grid can be ten years long and the government wants to put them at the back of it. The think tanks’ objection — that gas and green do not match — is right if the gas is fossil and the turbine is the main supply. But turn it around: on Lolland there is electricity the island cannot get rid of, green gas in the pipe for backup instead of diesel generators, and a district heating network in Nakskov that has just lost its surplus heat. If the data centres are coming anyway, let them land where the energy already is.
From our side of the table
We have supplied burners and boilers to installers, industry and marine since 1969, and today we make our living from both combustion technology and heat pumps. So let us put the technical part simply.
A gas burner cannot tell biomethane from Nysted apart from natural gas from the North Sea. Upgraded biogas is delivered in the same quality as the gas the grid has always carried, and an Oilon burner runs on it without modification. The consumption side needs no new technology. When a company moves from oil to gas, it is usually the burner that is replaced while the boiler stays — and where security of supply demands it, there are dual-fuel burners that keep oil in reserve. Fill the reserve tank with HVO instead of fossil gas oil, and the backup layer is green too. New industrial burners can also be supplied hydrogen-ready, so that the day Lolland’s PtX delivers, the burner is not the bottleneck. And where process heat can be handled by a heat pump, we supply that instead. Oilon builds those too.
We hold no shares in the pipe. Our interest is that what gets burned on Lolland-Falster is green — and that it gets burned in equipment that works.
The liquid sibling
A liquid footnote belongs here, because this is not only a gas story.
Biomethane and HVO are the same idea in two phases: green molecules that fit infrastructure already paid for. Biogas fits the pipe and the boiler. HVO — liquid biofuel made from used fats — fits the tank and the burner. The pipe to Lolland-Falster is the collective version of the idea. The oil tank is the individual one. The idea is unfolded in the essay Reguler molekylet, ikke apparatet (in Danish).
And they share a geography. The pipe reaches the industry and the towns along the line. The rest of Lolland-Falster — the farms and houses with oil boilers, far from both district heating and the gas grid — has HVO as its green molecule, in the boiler that is already there. Turn the pipe around and fill the reserve tanks with HVO, and no part of the region needs to wait for a connection to go green.
Finally
The pipe was a bad decision if it was a pipe to one factory. It is a good decision if it is a pipe from a whole region. The decision is made and the bill has been sent — to every gas customer in the country. The direction is still ours to choose.
Turn it around.
Arne Nielsen A/S has supplied burners, boilers and heating technology to installers, industry and marine since 1969 — today both combustion technology and heat pumps. Which is why biogas, hydrogen and HVO all belong in the conversation.
Tel. (+45) 56 21 50 50
https://arnenielsen.com/
Sources
- Nordzucker, press release 25 Aug 2026; DR, TV 2, Ritzau, Information, Kristeligt Dagblad and Ingeniøren, 25 Aug 2026: closure of Nakskov from January 2027, up to 150 jobs, production consolidated in Nykøbing Falster, European overcapacity as the stated reason
- DR, TV 2 and EnergiWatch, 25-26 Aug 2026: the climate minister’s remarks (“not a good decision”; written comment to Ritzau on infrastructure “that does not belong to the future”); Brian Vad Mathiesen on the economics and the “appendix” to Nakskov
- EnergiWatch, 26 Aug 2026: business minister Martin Lidegaard on the goal of ending Danish gas consumption not being the same as ending North Sea production
- EnergiWatch/Ritzau, 20 Sep 2026: the Social Liberals pause their criticism of North Sea extraction; no licence extension beyond 2042; the government undecided; the Lidegaard quote on compromises
- Energinet and Evida, application for Grøn Gas Lolland-Falster to the Danish EPA, 31 Mar 2020 (sgavmst.dk, case documents): purpose, flow direction four/eight months, precondition of at least 50% local biogas, 330 mm, max. 40 bar; EPA § 25 permit, 13 May 2022
- TV2 ØST, 2 Sep 2024; Klimamonitor, 4 Jul 2024; DR, 25 Aug 2026: 115 km Everdrup–Nakskov, originally DKK 792m, ended at just under DKK 1.5bn; capacity up to 290m m³ a year; Hans Henrik Lindboe (Ea Energianalyse) on the 2021 warning and the “hadegave”
- Altinget, 18 Oct 2024; Klimamonitor, 4 Jul 2024: financed through tariffs — approx. 292,000-300,000 household gas customers and 30-38,000 businesses pay most of it; Andel pays DKK 100m for 15 years of capacity; households cannot connect without a heat plan
- Femern Business, 26 Feb 2025: parliamentary answer on agreements with five companies and 15 interested; local businesses on the multiplied connection price
- Jyllands-Posten (via Ritzau), autumn 2024: Nordic Sugar the only connected company; the ministry’s expectation of 15-20 companies
- Lolland Forsyning, 24 Feb 2025; Folketidende, 22 Oct 2025; TV 2, 25 Aug 2026: the surplus-heat agreement, up to 10 MW, approx. 5,000 straw bales a year, inaugurated 21 Oct 2025
- Evida, 8 Apr 2026; Effektivt Landbrug, 8 Apr 2026; TV2 ØST, 8 Apr 2026: Nysted Bioenergi connected as the first plant, 100,000 tonnes of biomass, 8.5m m³, compressor station supplying locally or to southern Zealand, agreement with a second plant; Bigadan on PtX; 653m m³ of biogas into the grid in 2025
- Nature Energy (via Ritzau); Business Lolland-Falster, 14 Oct 2024: plant at Abed, approx. 400,000 tonnes, just over 20m m³, expected in operation in 2026
- Business Lolland-Falster, 14 Oct 2024; FemernReport, 19 Dec 2024; Folketidende, 16 May 2026; TV2 ØST, 4 Jul 2026; Resights, 21 Apr 2026: Lolland-Falster Bioenergi — 50/50 with Danish Agro, over DKK 0.5bn, 400-500,000 tonnes from some 70 farms, 55-60m m³, production expected 2028, financing in place, Holeby site rejected, biomethane to the grid or as LBG
- Folketidende, 23 Dec 2022; Maskinbladet (Biofuel Technology, 2022): straw plant at Stensø, DKK 475m, 170 jobs, capacity equal to the other three planned plants combined, the pipeline as precondition; TV2 ØST, 10 Jul 2026: Biofuel Technology sold to Green2x on 3 Jul 2026, plans postponed
- Business Lolland-Falster, 13 Sep 2024: the inauguration, Henrik Høegh on a pipe “from” Lolland-Falster
- HVO.BIO, 15 Sep 2026: “Reguler molekylet, ikke apparatet”
- Business Lolland-Falster, 14 Nov 2022: three to four times the islands’ own consumption, biogenic CO2 for PtX
- EnergiWatch, 17 Sep 2026: new report (KL) — Denmark will not reach the 2035 gas target under the current framework; district heating projects braked or downscaled; KL proposes a ban on new gas boilers in district heating areas and extra support where green heat is expensive
- Version2/Ingeniøren, 7 Sep 2026; EnergiWatch, 10 Sep 2026: more than ten data centres have shown interest in the gas grid since spring 2025 for own power production via gas turbines or engines; up to ten years’ wait for the electricity grid after the connection stop; the government’s bill puts data centres last in line; think tank concerned for the climate targets
- EnergiWatch, 2 Sep 2026: biogas production covered 82% of Denmark’s total gas consumption in August; this year’s production already matches all households’ gas consumption for the whole of 2026
