About The Sichuan Household Biogas Programme

Clean, Affordable and Convenient Biogas for Poor Rural Households

Key facts

Location

Sichuan, China
Project Type

Renewable energy - household biogas
Annual GHG Emissions Reduction

approx. 725,000 tCO2e

Project Standard

CDM, Gold Standard for the Global Goals
Included Households

395,435 low-income rural households
Project IDs

CDM PoA 2898, GS 1239
Project Status

Registered and with issuance of GS CERs and GS VERs
All reported impact figures apply for vintage 2022

Resources

Background

Back in 2010, when this PoA was launched, the rural areas in Sichuan Province were among the poorest in China. With an average annual per capita cash income of only around 500 EUR, the province contained 43 counties that had been officially declared as national poverty counties in order to facilitate government assistance for improving their economic conditions.

In addition, Sichuan is repeatedly hit by severe natural disasters. In 2008, a heavy earthquake claimed the lives of nearly 70,000 people in Sichuan, leaving another 4.8 million homeless, while 12 million animals of productive livestock were killed during this devastating event.

Virtual Tour

Project Description

UPM’s Sichuan Household Biogas PoA aims at improving the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable people in rural Sichuan while contributing to protect the earth’s climate and promoting sustainable development. To this end, this programme exlusively addresses poor smallholders with just a few pigs and uses carbon finance to help them afford the purchase and maintenance of biogas digesters.

This approach has been very successful. Meanwhile, 395,435 low-income rural households in China’s Sichuan province have decided to take part in this programme and are benefitting from using proven and reliable biogas digesters and efficient biogas cook stoves making it one of the largest and most impactful household biogas programmes in the world.

The biogas digesters are fed with animal manure, previously just discharged into open pits, and convert it into clean and affordable biogas to be used conveniently for cooking, heating, or lighting instead of coal and firewood. After switching to biogas, each participating smallholder farmer family saves approx. 1.8 tCO₂e of methane and carbon dioxide emissions year by year. This amounts to an annual GHG emissions avoidance of around 725,000 tCO₂e.

Beyond this enormous positive climate impact, the project verifiably contributes to achieving many Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and has numerous co-benefits for the included households, such as saved expenditures for coal, better health due to reduced indoor air pollution and better sanitary conditions, and significantly less nuisance from flies and odours.

All biogas equipment distributed under this programme is produced domestically in China and adheres to Chinese quality and safety standards. It is installed and maintained by the Sichuan Rural Energy Office (SREO) via its dense network of local service centers and its many certified biogas technicians all over Sichuan.

All households supported by this programme have received the required trainings by SREO staff on safe use of biogas to prevent any dangerous accidents and make sure that the biogas digesters operate without malfunctions or interruptions until (or even beyond) their 20-year lifetime.

Meet the Team

Due to its unique scale, the Sichuan Household Biogas Programme is one of the most complex and labour-intensive carbon reduction projects ever. After all biogas digesters have been distributed under this programme and thousands of temporary jobs have been created for biogas technicians, hundreds of people in China and Germany are still working permanently for this PoA.

They are involved with the maintenance of the biogas digesters, the collection of relevant data for each household, updates of the programme management database, the execution of the required statistical surveys, as well as with operating this programme under CDM and Gold Standard, carrying through its annual monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) and marketing its carbon credits.

All these different tasks could not be accomplished without the close co-operation of the PoA’s key stakeholders and an international team of experts with complemementary education and skills.

Each step in the project cycle requires the right person at the right spot!

UPM

UPM is a leading company in the international carbon markets. We are an experienced developer of ambitious climate protection projects with substantial co-benefits and dispose of a large and diversified portfolio of high-quality carbon credits. UPM has developed this programme under CDM and GS4GG and now takes care of coordinating its ongoing MRV and selling its carbon credits.

OASIS

UPM’s Chinese business partner Oasis is the Coordinating and Managing Entity (C/ME) of the programme. They coordinate all data collection, supervise carbon finance revenue sharing in China, help to arrange site visits and are the main point of contact to important Chinese authorities and the Sichuan Rural Energy Office.

SREO

The SREO promotes the use of household biogas in rural Sichuan and disposes of a dense network of biogas service centers all over this province. The SREO is responsible for the local implemention of this programme. It provides the required infrastructure and certified biogas technicians for constructing and maintaining the digesters and for collecting all necessary data at household level.

Do you need further information about the project?

Please check out this programme’s compilation of marketing material:

Resources

And, please feel free to contact us.