The 2nd biggest biogas plant in the world to feed gas directly into the national gas grid is set to go into operation in eastern Germany at the beginning of 2009. The plant at Könnern will feed 15 million cubic meters (m³) of biomethane into the national grid for use by customers anywhere in Germany. Experts say it is the start of a boom in biogas as the country’s energy providers increasingly look to home-produced biogas to reduce their dependence on natural gas imported from Russia.
In 2007, there were 1280 megawatts (MW) of installed biogas capacity and about 3,750 biogas plants in Germany. As much as 20 percent of Germany’s natural gas needs could be supplied from biogas by 2020, according to Andrea Horbelt of the German Biogas Association. Horbelt said that some studies predicted that Germany could even supply its entire natural gas needs using biogas if it were able to tap the agriculture potential of Eastern Europe with sufficient efficiency.
“Biogas is the market of the future because it allows energy to be produced and transported economically and in a decentralized way around the country,” said Pivi Scamperle of agri.capital, the company that runs Germany’s largest existing EU €10 million biogas plant, feeding 6 million m³ of biomethane into the national grid. The boom in biogas comes thanks to a key technological breakthrough a year ago that allowed biogas to be injected into the natural gas grid and so transported around Germany economically, said Thomas Wilkens of WELtec BioPower, a company that manufactures biogas units.
Until that breakthrough, as much as two-thirds of all the energy produced by combined heat and power biogas plants couldn’t be used because there was not enough demand for heat at the point of generation — usually in agricultural areas — and there was no technology available either to put the gas into a pipeline and bring it to customers in other places. “Biogas from Konnern will go all around Germany through the national grid,” Wilkens said. “There is a growing demand for plants like this because energy providers are eager to find a way of reducing Germany’s dependence on expensive gas from Russia. Biogas could make a big contribution to energy self-sufficiency as well as to fighting global warming.”
Thirty farmers in the vicinity of Konnern will deliver 120,000 tonnes of raw materials each year, mainly corn crops. The eight fermenting tanks are expected to produce 30 million m³ of biogas per year, which will be processed into 15 million m³ of biomethane. “The biogas won’t be burned to produce electricity but will be put instead through a special process of chemical washing without pressure so that it ends up having the same composition as natural gas and so can be injected into the same pipelines as carry the natural gas,” Wilkens told RenewableEnergyWorld.com. Biogas contains about 60 percent methane and 40 percent carbon dioxide while natural gas contains about 97 percent methane. The technology at Konnern involves filtering out the carbon dioxide to increase the proportion of methane in the biogas. At the end of the process, the biogas is 99 percent biomethane.
The Konnern biogas plant is almost as big as the Huckabay Ridge Renewable Natural Gas facility in Stephenville, Texas, where 635,000 MMBtu of biomethane generated from cow manure and other organic waste has been injected into the Enterprise natural gas pipeline since January 2008, making it the world’s biggest.
– from www.renewableenergyworld.com
Bio-fuels from food items are not good. That will increase the price of food. Also it uses fertilizers made from petroleum which will cause global warming.
weltec Bio gas plant started working from September 2009.