OREANDA-NEWS. At groundbreaking ceremony, RWE Innogy and the State Secretary of the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of the Environment, Peter Knitsch, officially kicked off the construction phase of a modern biogas plant. The ceremony was also attended by representatives of the Rhein-Erft district, the city of Bergheim and the regional agricultural industry. After its completion in spring of 2014, the plant located in Bergheim-Paffendorf will have an capacity of 7.4 MW and inject some 700 cbm of biogas per hour into the public grid. The investment volume will total some ˆ 13 million.

„Transforming the energy market successfully is a joint task, in which energy utilities have great responsibility. With its new biogas plant, RWE Innogy is moving in the right direction - in particular, because new energy crops such as silphium and wild flowers, grown on former opencast mine sites, will be tested in the new plant,” says Peter Knitsch, State Secretary of the Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Agriculture, Nature Conservation and Consumer Protection of the State of North-Rhine Westphalia.

Groundbreaking ceremony for biogas plant in Bergheim-Paffendorf

Dr Hans Bunting, CEO of RWE Innogy GmbH: “Today, we are sowing an important seed for the energy supply of the future and officially starting the construction of our state-of-the-art biogas plant. The novel plant concept involves the use of alternative energy crops. At the same time, we are relying on trusted partnerships with the regional agricultural industry. Energy from the region for the region is our credo”.

The raw biogas generated is treated in the plant to upgrade it to natural gas quality and can be injected into the natural gas grid. This makes it available for regional combined heat-and-power plants. The biomethane can be used to supply heat to the equivalent of some 3,300 households annually.

Illustration Biogas plant Bergheim-Paffendorf

Maria Pfordt, Mayor of the city of Bergheim, adds: “With today's groundbreaking, RWE not only confirms its partnership on the path towards a renewables-based energy industry in Germany, but also its partnership with the city of Bergheim. RWE is supporting us in our structural change process aimed at securing the future for the district as an industrial location. Energy expertise is and will remain a tremendous asset that we can leverage together”.

A diversified mix of resources, produced by the regional agricultural industry, will be used in the biogas plant. Resources will include silages of whole plants, grass and maize, as well as sugar beets, alfalfa, and agricultural fertilizers. New energy crops, such as silphium perfoliatum and wildflowers will also be tested in the plant.

Bethold Rothe, head of the building department of the Rhein-Erft district, says: “The Rhein-Erft district welcomes RWE's commitment in the field of distributed energy generation and specifically this biogas plant in Bergheim-Paffendorf. We also welcome the fact that RWE does not intend to only use maize or other foodstuffs or feedstuffs, but also other organic material, including plants from land to be recultivated or fallow land”.

Some of the resources will be supplied from the areas surrounding RWE's opencast mines. For this purpose, RWE planted 160,000 silphium seedings on two recultivation areas in the Garzweiler opencast mine. The majority of resources required will be delivered by the regional agricultural industry. In total, some 55,000 tons of renewable resources will be required annually.

Josef-Albert Rath, chairman of the board of the agricultural association Maschinenring Neuss-Monchengladbach/ Gilbach e.V., adds: “As farmers from the region, we are prepared to promote the energy market transformation; we found our partner RWE Energy long before Fukushima. We are looking forward to combining forces with RWE Innogy to make the biogas plant in Bergheim-Paffendorf a success!”