France’s Bionersis wins biogas recovery contract in Vietnam

Paris-based Bionersis has been awarded a €6 million ($9 million) contract to develop a new biogas recovery unit for a landfill site in Vietnam.

The Euronext Paris-listed company (EPA:MLBRS) specializes in landfill gas valorization on a global level for the renewable energy sector. It generates carbon credits by capturing and destroying landfill gas through its installations around the world.

Company spokesman Nicolas Gourgues confirmed with the Cleantech Group today that the project, at the Nam Son landfill near Hanoi, is projected to help reduce three million tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the first 10 years of the project.

The site, which receives about 3,000 tons of domestic waste per day, is managed by URENCO (Urban Environment Co.), the Vietnamese body in charge of landfill management in Vietnam.

It is also expected to include energy recovery from the biogas, delivering up to 40,000 megawatt hours per year to the local grid, he said. The transaction is expected to be finalized by Dec. 31.

"Bionersis will actually take over the consortium who originally entered into the landfill gas agreement with URENCO but failed to deliver," Gourgues said. "It demonstrates that we are now perceived as the most credible party to run this type of project with a strong and complete value proposition."

But this is just a first step for Bionersis in Vietnam. The company plans to develop several projects with URENCO, and is already working on the second project, he said.

Earlier this month, Bionersis signed a deal to sell carbon credits from four landfill projects in Latin America to EDF Trading, the trading arm of state-owned French utility EDF (EPA:EEN), which invests in other cleantech sectors (see Tidal power gets modern in France and 38 MW farm to boost EDF’s wind energy presence in Europe).

The projects are to produce nearly 1.5 million carbon credits by 2012 and up to four million over the next 10 years.

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