Global Bioenergy Industry News
WELtec Enters China Market
Construction work is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2010.
The plant with an output of 370 kWel will be China‘s first biogas plant that meets German quality standards. The fact that all parts are manufactured directly by the company is one of the reasons why WELtec received the order.
The plant's two 60,000-cubic-feet fermenters will be fed with 15,000 tonnes of pig manure and 1,500 tons of rice straw a year.
The feedstock will come from farms in the vicinity.
The concept of the WELtec plant to be established in Wuxi, a city of 4.5 million located 45 minutes driving distance to the west of Shanghai, is based on the processing of gas to biomethane for own use.
In China, it is not yet common practice to feed in generated energy into the electricity grid. Therefore, the common approach is either to generate biomethane and use it directly or to use the generated energy directly for own needs.
Due to its ongoing economic development, Wuxi is dubbed Little Shanghai. The city is an attractive location for investors, particularly in the field of renewable energy, and is already home to several solar companies.
The district also has a forward looking academic institution with the renowed Fermentation and Food Processing departments of the Southern Yangtze University.
China‘s activities in the field of renewable energies are ambitious; though the country has huge coal reserves (estimated at 120 billion tonnes), it hardly has any gas and oil reserves. Although coal is being used intensively, the population often experiences outages due to the low efficiency of the coal-fired power plants. This is another reason for the trend towards decentralised combined heat and power supply. Biogas is becoming increasingly popular especially in rural areas, where about 900 million Chinese live.
According to the biogas development concept, the number of households to use this resource by 2010 is approximately 40 million. The biogas potential is estimated at 5 trillion cubic feet a year – enough to supply the entire rural population with energy for cooking and lighting.
Another goal is to equip seven per cent of the rural households with biogas plants by 2020 and so, the share of renewable energies in power generation is to increase to 15 per cent by 2020.
Some of the conditions for the utilisation of biomass in industrialised areas are already in place: large sugar manufacturers generate power for their own needs from their waste. More than 800MW are generated in the sugar provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi alone.
In China, the WELtec BioPower order could serve as a reference for the biogas plant manufacturer: the World Expo 2010 will be held in Shanghai, and the plant investor is one of the exhibitors.
| TheBioenergySite News Desk |
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