Business

Business News[ ] Thriving Enterprises and Dying Farms

Strike Action Avoided

By Peter Berlin

The Swedish labour union Handels had called for strike action among its members beginning on November 13. The day before, the union announced that the strike had been called off thanks to a last-minute agreement reached with the employer association Svensk Handel. Had the strike gone ahead, it would for instance

Helping Americans job seekers

company, was founded in 2019 and got off to a rocky start. Paradoxically, Covid-19 has helped boost the company’s fortunes.

Instead of employing staff to interview and place job seekers, Intro uses artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly match applicants and vacancies online. The firm serves mainly the engineering and information technology sectors. Because the coronavirus has created an unprecedented workingfrom-home culture, it is possible for someone living in, say, San Diego to find full-time work with a company in Seattle. Since employers are no longer restricted to their immediate geographical areas in their search for staff, the former have a much wider choice of candidates. By the same token, applicants have a wider choice of prospective employers.

Intro’s recruitment services have proven popular in Scandinavia, and particularly so in the United States. Unemployment is still a big problem on both sides of the Atlantic, and the situation may deteriorate further if new waves of the coronavirus force businesses to resume laying off inhave affected deliveries of food items from central storage facilities to individual grocery stores, leaving some of the stores with empty shelves and forcing others to close their doors. A consequence of store closures might have been that customers would congregate in stores that still remained open, making social distancing more difficult and accelerating the spread of COVID-19.

The labour dispute was primarily about pay, and the lowest paid house staff. Thanks to its innovative use of AI, Intro offers job seekers an opportunity to find new jobs quickly and to work from the safety of their homes.

Reprieve for Scandinavian minks

Prime Minister announced that all 17 million minks on the country’s mink farms had to be culled. The stated reason was that the minks were found to carry a modified form of the coronavirus which could spread to humans and complicate the task of developing an effective vaccine. So far, 214 persons have been found to carry the modified virus. After 2½ million minks had already been killed, the Danish Parliament declared the culling to be against the law and decreed that it be halted immediately.

In the meantime, the modified coronavirus has been detected in a small number of minks on farms in the southern Swedish province of Blekinge. Because the annual culling of minks for their fur is ongoing, the authorities see no need for additional culling due to the virus at the present time. Should the governments in Denmark and Sweden reverse their employees will now see a salary increase of around 5.5 percent over 29 months. The dispute was also about employment conditions – notably the tendency of companies to favour the highly unpopular zero-hour contracts whereby an employer does not have to guarantee the employee a minimum number of working hours. This matter and some other issues related to working conditions have yet to be resolved between the parties, but at least the

Intro, a Swedish recruitment

In early November, the Danish

threat of strike action is over for now. decisions due to further spread of the virus, analysts fear that it may spell the end of the mink fur business in both countries.

Woman leads world's oldest company

Annica Bresky was born in Greece in 1975. She left her home country as a teenager and travelled to Sweden in search of an education and a career. She succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Today she is the President and CEO of the Swedish-Finnish corporation Stora Enso with 26,000 employees worldwide and a history that goes back to the 13th century.

Stora Enso calls itself “the renewable materials company.” Its eco-friendly products are based on wood and biomass. They are utilized Annica Bresky, President and CEO, Stora Enso. Photo: Fond&Fond by a range of industries and applications worldwide, such as building, retail, food and beverages, manufacturing, publishing, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, confectionary, hygiene and textiles.

On the Path to Significantly Reduce Carbon Emissions

By Peter Berlin

From its beginnings as a small start-up enterprise, the Scandinavian company Liquid Wind is planning to build large facilities for producing renewable hydrogen and converting it into methanol, with the help of electricity from wind power. This so-called electro-methanol, or eMethanol, is intended to replace fossil fuels over time. It is made from hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Ordinary water is first split into oxygen and renewable hydrogen in a so-called electrolyzer. To make methanol, the hydrogen output is then combined in a reactor with carbon dioxide captured from industry. The eMethanol is expected to be sold to the shipping industry, where Liquid Wind is still alone in its niche.

The driving force behind the business lies in part in society’s growing realization that biofuels, fuel cells and direct electricity cannot replace all fossil fuels.

Each Liquid Wind facility will convert carbon dioxide emissions into carbon neutral fuel. All photos © Liquid Wind except bottome right © 123rf

“Until recently, the thermochemical process has been too costly for largescale production, but now the cost of generating renewable electricity and hydrogen is falling at the same time as the market begins to value sustainability. By 2030, we aim for our eMethanol to have reached price parity with fossil fuels,” says Claes Fredriksson, CEO of Liquid Wind.

After several years of development work, planning and engineering for Liquid Wind's first production facility FlagshipONE is now well underway. It will likely be located in Örnsköldsvik in the north of Sweden, where the company has started a collaboration with the energy utility Övik Energi. The facility is planned to be ready in early 2024 with a daily production of 160 tons of eMethanol, corresponding to an annual production of at least 50,000 tons. The final investment will come to a total of SEK 1.5 billion (US$ 130m). The decision to proceed will be made in 2022.

Once the first operational facility is completed in 2024, additional facilities will be built. The plan is to construct ten production facilities in Scandinavia by 2030, and then to expand the network of facilities to 500 locations around the world. The scale-up reflects big ambitions to replace fossil fuels and significantly reduce carbon emissions. Internationally, the technology will be licensed to local operators. To support the expansion plan, Liquid Wind has an international expert consortium behind it, including Siemens Energy of Germany, the Danish chemical engineering group Haldor Topsøe, the Danish EPC company BWSC, and the Londonbased Carbon Clean.

Conditions in many parts of North America are ideal to produce eFuel, and Liquid Wind is already in discussions with potential codevelopers for Canada. See also www.liquidwind.se.