A Chinese investor has engaged WELtec BioPower GmbH from Vechta for the setup of a biogas plant. 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 tons of pig manure and 1,500 tons of rice straw a year. The resources will come from farms in the vicinity. The concept of the WELtec plant to be established in Wuxi, a city of 4.5 million people 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.
China‘s activities in the field of renewable energies are ambitious; though the country has huge coal reserves (estimated at 120 billion tons), 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.
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