E.ON creates company to feed biogas into the natural gas grid

Quicknote biogas
German energy giant E.ON AG, one of the major public utility companies in Europe and the world’s largest investor-owned energy service provider, has announced [*German] it has created E.ON Bioerdgas GmbH, a company dedicated to feeding biogas into Europe's natural gas network.

The new company will have its headquarters in Essen and will unite all of E.ON's biogas activities, in particular the purification process. Biogas is obtained by the anaerobic fermentation of biomass. Typical methane yields are 60-70%, with the rest being mainly CO2. Scrubbing out the carbon-monoxide allows producers to obtain a gas with a methane content similar to that of natural gas.

The green gas is experiencing a real boom in Europe. In Germany alone, €1 billion was invested in the sector in 2006, making it the fastest growing segment of all renewables. Some 10,000 people have found employment in this sector in Germany in 2006 (planning, construction, manufacture and operation of biogas plants; producing feedstocks), with some 3,500 medium-scale plants online, which produce approximately five billion KWh of electricity. The German Biogas Association projects the amount to double once again in the first half of this year (earlier post).

The Association concludes that at this pace and with current technologies, the industry will tap a potential that can replace half of all Russian gas imports 'in the near future'. Earlier, Ulrich Schmack, an energy advisor to the German government, who also heads the world's leading biogas plant manufacturer, projected that the biofuel can replace all natural gas imports from Russia by 2030 (earlier post).

E.ON's initiative is based on successful trials in Sweden, where the company experimented with feeding biogas into the grid for several years. In Germany, a number of biogas purification plants, owned by E.ON, are now under construction (earlier post). Meanwhile, the company is also building 150 biogas motorway filling stations to serve cars (earlier post).

Jürgen Lenz, technical director of E.ON Ruhrgas, says that "until now, 'normal biogas' was mainly used for the production of on-site electricity and heat. By feeding the gas into the natural gas grid, we can give it a much wider reach and make it available for the same applications as natural gas. The pipeline network becomes the bridge between the production site and the end-user."

Because the biofuel will be fed into the main gas grid, natural gas capable cars (CNG) will utilize it without noticing it. E.ON says that of all current and future biofuels (including cellulosic ethanol), biogas is the most efficient when it comes to the total well-to-wheel energy balance: per hectare of biogas crops (such as dedicated maize), an average CNG passenger car can travel 100,000 kilometers. This unparalleled efficiency explains Europe's growing interest in the fuel. The gas also has the lowest CO2 footprint of all biofuels (earlier post) [entry ends here.]
biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: energy balance :: biogas :: natural gas :: CNG :: Germany ::