BDI-BioEnergy to build biogas facility in France
January 4, 2012
BY Luke Geiver
Add France to the list of countries housing BDI-BioEnergy International biogas facilities, joining Italy, Turkey and Germany. The company recently announced a $4.45 million plant for a waste disposal corporation in Marl, France, and has developed a new separation technology to be used there.
Although Hermann Stockinger, director of sales for BDI, declined to release the client’s name, he did note that the industrial anaerobic digestion plant will use a tailor-made waste separation technology. “The applied separation technology is a part of the whole substrate treatment unit and splits organic matter from an organic/inorganic mixture of various waste streams,” he said. “(It) leads to extremely low contamination of the biogas substrate and to a clean and dry side fraction.” The technique used to separate the substrates also allows BDI to feed those substrates directly into the fermentation units, without the formation of the floating sludge layer.
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Construction of the facility has already begun, and once complete, the plant will produce roughly 2.1 MW of electricity per year. The company also said the plant will be well suited for additional capacity, something Stockinger’s team plans even in the early stages of a plant’s development. “In general, our separation technology is always adapted to our customers’ needs and requirements,” he said. “We do not deliver standard solutions, but provide tailor-made systems.”
Those systems may include anything from takeover bunkers to highly sophisticated screens and pulpers, Stockinger added. “In most cases, a combination of several of such components is used to comply with the variety of often difficult to handle waste materials.” Because each plant is different, he said, BDI always accounts for future customer needs and later expansion plans during the initial planning stages.
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Edgar Ahn, chief scientific officer of BDI, said the company’s experience in developing and building multi-feedstock biodiesel plants helped it understand and design industrial waste biogas plants. He added that the future Marl facility is further evidence that BDI chose the right technologies, and the market for biogas plants has tremendous global growth potential.
Stockinger provided the same perspective on the growth potential for biogas in 2012 and beyond. The largest area for potential, he said, comes from biogas produced from waste materials, both in Europe and abroad. Although Europe offers the most potential for BDI based on the proven, existing facilities already there, Stockinger said North America could represent opportunities, too. “The U.S. market and Canada entail a big potential for us due to the rising ecological awareness in combination with the enormous potential of organic waste.”
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