EnviTec Biogas delivers its fifth biogas plant in China

Photo by EnviTec Biogas AG

The Chinese New Year starts on 16 February 2018 – the Year of the Brown Earth Dog, who stands for hard work and dependability. “These are exactly the kinds of traits and abilities with which we are impressing clients in the Chinese market,” says Jörg Fischer, CFO of EnviTec Biogas AG. The ground-breaking ceremony for a 1,570 Nm3 biogas plant in the province of Shanxi, 500 km southwest of Beijing, now marks the fifth biogas project in the People’s Republic of China for the biogas all-rounder from Lohne and Saerbeck, Germany.

The customer – Shanxi Shenmu New Energy Co. Ltd. – will itself be responsible for operating the plant following its planned completion at the end of 2018, and is also handling all construction works. Fischer: “We are naturally providing our customer with expertise, and supplying both project and construction supervisors and senior installation personnel who are organising the construction process and managing it on-site.”

Growing bio CNG market in China

All engineering expertise on the plant has been drawn from the pooled know-how of EnviTec’s experts: “We are supplying the main components of the input systems and biogas plant, while the customer is constructing the gas utilization systems,” says Fischer. Each of the six digesters used to generate biogas has a volume of 5,250 cubic meters. Alongside two walking floors, a total of four biogas Kreis-Dissolver® units are used to process the input materials, which include maize silage, turkey manure, and dairy slurry. Once commissioning is complete, the biogas produced will be compressed to bio CNG (compressed natural gas) and sold locally from the plant premises. In China, CNG is very much a growth market. “Together with our sales partner, we now have four employees in China at the moment, busy handling the large number of inquiries,” CFO Fischer reports.

One of these inquiries came from Shanxi Shenmu New Energy Co. Ltd. Fischer: “After initial contact at the Sino-German Biogas Conference, the customer visited our flagship plant in Dingzhou. At this site, the Visitor Centre, lab and central control room were designed and built to ensure that visitors can view the mixing line and technical systems via a glass-walled corridor and tunnel.” All of which very much impressed the customer!

Shanxi Shenmu is a subsidiary of Shanxi Coal & Chemical Industry Group Co. Ltd. This state-run Group employs around 130,000 people and is one of the biggest corporations in China.

Following Minhe I and II, Yingtan and Dingzhou, the construction project in Shanxi is now the fifth plant that EnviTec Biogas has sold to the Chinese market. Fischer: “In the near future, China will remain a huge source of potential revenue – although competition will become fiercer in what is now a growing market.” However, as an all-rounder with long-standing international expertise, the German Group is ideally positioned for further construction projects and ventures on the burgeoning Chinese biogas market.

For more information, please visit http://www.envitec-biogas.com.

• CID: 19613