Drivers of busses, taxis and private cars in the Chinese city of Anyang may soon find themselves filling up their tanks not with ordinary diesel or petrol, but with biogas made available by Danish environmental technology. In an effort to curb the rapid rise in the country's CO2 emissions, Chinese authorities have started looking around for alternative fuel sources, and one such alternative might very well be the biogas technology provided by Danish engineering firm Niras.

"What the Chinese really want is our detailed knowledge of how to set up a biogas facility that's working perfectly right from the start," says Preben Roegild Knudsen, project manager at Niras. "In Denmark we've spent 20 years working on this – the first 10 of which were spent on making mistakes and learning from them. But for the last 10 years the facilities have functioned commercially."

The Niras biogas system works by turning agricultural manure and sewage from public toilets into fuel, and the future facility in Anyang is to produce a daily amount of biogas energy equivalent to 9,000 litres of diesel. Since 1990 China has more than doubled the level of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, and the Middle Kingdom is now the second-worst environmental offender in the world, according to UN figures. Consequently the market for green technology is expanding rapidly in the Asian industrial juggernaut and Niras hopes to profit greatly from the new trend. The Alleroed-based company has high hopes for the future of Danish biogas technology in the Far East and hopes to have no less than 100 facilities up and running all over China within the next decade.

Full story in Danish

News category: Denmark

Published on this site: Jul. 15, 2008
Source:dr.dk/nyheder/penge