In Germany, ETW Energietechnik from Moers has built a biomethane plant in Rittershoffen, in Alsace, in cooperation with the planning office Rytec from Baden Baden. The processing capacity of the plant, which went into operation in February 2023, is about 700 normal cubic meters of raw biogas per hour. This means that up to 350 normal cubic meters of biomethane are fed into the natural gas grid every hour. This is roughly equivalent to the average fuel consumption of 20,000 passenger cars.
The project was initiated by three young, visionary farmers from Alsace who are committed to environmental protection and regenerative energies and want to promote sustainable agricultural use in the region. Only agricultural residues from the immediate surroundings are used as substrates.
Especially the very low power consumption of 137.6 kilowatts electric makes ETW‘s plant state of the art for biomethane plants of this size class. This significantly reduces the risk of future electricity price increases. Even with a downstream high-pressure compression plant, which compresses the processed biomethane to 67.7 barg (bar gauge) and feeds it into the natural gas grid, the power consumption of the entire plant is less than 202 kilowatts electrically, significantly lower than comparable products on the market. This means that the entire plant consumes less than 7 per cent of the energy provided by the biomethane.
