News

The devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on 12 January has meant a desperate lack of sanitation facilities but now Brazilian group Viva Rio is turning human excrement into biogas for use as fuel. The Kay Nou camp in Port-au-Prince is one of many to have flourished in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince since the earthquake. The camps are absorbing many of the estimated 1 million people made…
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Vancouver-based Fortress Paper will buy a disused pulp mill in Quebec and spend $153 million (€111 million) to reopen it as a biomass plant. A 25MW power plant fed by waste from its operations and from an extensive local network of chip and other biomass suppliers is expected to begin supplying electricity by late 2012. The company further plans to begin production of dissolving grade…
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Bioenergy International expo & conference is organised by leading publication Biofuels International (BI) magazine, and here Jan Stambasky (JS), executive board member of the European Biogas Association, provides an insight into what he will be speaking about at the event in Prague, Czech Republic, on 5-6 May. Founded just a year ago the association is growing fast, echoing the development…
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UK chancellor Alistair Darling will announce a £1 billion (€1.1 billion) fund to inject investment in green transport and energy projects. The UK government is committed to reducing UK carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 and so changes in infrastructure and power generation will be needed over the coming decades. The Labour Government hopes to upgrade the transport system to use cleaner fuels…
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Bioenergy International expo & conference is organised by leading publication Biofuels International magazine, and here Jaroslav Pesek, head of the quality department and strategic reserves at Czech state-run pipeline and storage terminal operator CEPRO, provides an insight into what he will be speaking about at the event in Prague, Czech Republic, on 5-6 May. CEPRO is heavily involved with…
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Biomass energy development company Helius Energy has been granted permission that will see the construction of an electricity plant at Avonmouth Dock, on the Bristol Channel, UK. The Department for Energy and Climate Change gave consent under Section 36 of The Electricity Act 1989 for Helius Energy to build a 100MW electricity-generation refinery that will be fuelled by biomass. The power…
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In Idaho, US, agribusiness giant Cargill’s second biogas project is up and running at the Bettencourt Dairy B6 farm in Jerome. Using anaerobic digestion (AD), the manure from the farm’s 6,000 cows is turned into methane, which is then burned in generators to create electricity. Cargill’s biogas project is producing enough renewable methane to generate electricity for approximately 1,100…
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According to a new report, ‘Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race? Growth, competition and opportunity in the world’s largest economies,’ China is the front-runner for investing in renewable technology, while the US and the UK are trailing behind in second and third places. In 2009 the UK invested around $11.2 billion (€8.3 billion), while China invested around three times this with…
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Green wastewater management company Freedom Environmental Services, headquartered in Orlando, US, has signed a contract that will see 26 acres of unused land in Brevard County developed into a waste-to-energy facility. The planned facility and full service wastewater treatment will make use of developed technologies such as anaerobic digestion (AD) and it is thought that this has the ability to…
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Bioenergy International expo & conference is organised by leading publication Biofuels International (BI) magazine, and here Dag Roger Rinde (DRR), managing director of Statoil Energy & Retail Norway, provides an insight into what he will be speaking about at the event in Prague, Czech Republic, on 5-6 May. Statoil is the first company in Norway to offer 5% ethanol to general consumers,…
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In a bid to stop energy company Eco2 constructing an unwanted biomass plant in their neighbourhood in North Lincolnshire, UK, protesters have suggested an alternative site. If the biomass plant is given the go-ahead it will create enough biomass to power 65,000 homes but at a cost of spoiling the area of Scawby Brook. In a compromise campaigners suggested that the firm explores the former…
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Xylem, a water technology company, has launched a new biogas support system – the Flygt BIS 1 biogas support system - specially adapted for the wall-mounting of submersible mixers in biogas digesters. “Biogas digesters have a sealed cover which means accessing the tank to change the mixer position is difficult,” said Eilert Balssen, market manager Biogas and Agriculture for…
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In March Stockton Borough Council in the UK will decide whether to give a multi-million pound green energy plant the go-ahead. The £150 million (€165 million) renewable energy refinery would burn around 400,000 tonnes of pine kernel to produce 49MW of power annually. The electricity generated will be exported to the National Grid via a sub-station at North Tees and provide enough power for…
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A sewage work upgrade project planned by UK utility provider Thames Water will also introduce an anaerobic digestion process, where solid waste is broken down in enclosed tanks in the absence of oxygen. This process forms biogas which can be used to generate renewable energy, and it is intended to produce enough energy to power the entire site. Thames Water began the £85 million (€94.7…
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