After many years of intensive project development work, our Chinese “Sichuan Poor Rural-Household Biogas Development Programme” (CDM Ref. 2898, GS ID 1239) has had its first issuance of approximately 80 k Gold Standard CERs today. Since the CDM Excecutive Board so far has only issued a total of slightly more than 58 k CERs to PoAs, this issuance will more than double the total amount of  available PoA CERs. Only five PoAs, including ours, have achieved issuance at all.

As described in this website, the programme enables up to one million low-income rural households in China’s Sichuan province to supply themselves conveniently and cheaply with renewable energy from their own small-scale biogas plants for cooking and heating. With a total potential GHG emissions reduction of up to 20 million tCO₂e due to avoided emissions of methane from animal husbandry and the substitution of coal and firewood by clean biogas, our benchmark PoA is one of the largest and most ambitious climate protection programmes within the CDM and the Gold Standard. In addition, it significantly improves income situation, environmental conditions, health and quality of living of the participating farmer families and thus strongly contributes to a sustainable regional development in Sichuan.

Our Household Biogas PoA is very well embedded within the political framework of its host country China. It is in line with today’s Chinese climate protection policy and complies with the focal aspects of energy, agriculture and regional development policy in the current Chinese Five-Year-Plan. Furthermore, the PoA builts upon an existing rural biogas promotion scheme of the Chinese government that is being implemented in Sichuan by the Sichuan Rural Energy Office (SREO).

Thanks to the proven cooperation with the SREO and our long-term local partner Oasis, the PoA’s implementation schedule has not only been achieved but exceeded. By the end of 2013, we expect to have reached an amount of approximately 620,000 installed and operating biogas digesters. As each year another 100,000 plants are added, we will have met the one million digester target already by the end of 2017. This would put us in the position to supply our customers with up to 2 million Gold Standard CERs per year on a reliable basis“, reports UPM’s Managing Director Martin Dilger.

Since recently, German logistics corporation Deutsche Post DHL is among the buyers of our PoA’s certificates for its voluntary carbon offset scheme “Go Green”. “The multifaceted technology (methane avoidance, methane containment, biofuel) and the resulting climate protection effects, as well as the numerous advantages for so many peasant families, whose living conditions are massively improved by the project, have been decisive to choose exactly this programme”, explains Dagmar Fellmann, Manager Renewables and Origination at NEAS Energy.

For further information on this PoA and the availability of its high quality Gold Standard CERs, contact us.

Update (22.01.2014): following the first GS CERs issuance of our Sichuan Household Biogas PoA, we have cancelled eleven of the issued GS-CERs to cover the personal offset of CO2 emissions offered to our partners in Europe and China for the new year.