China's Dragon Power to raise US$2 billion for 100 biomass power plants
According to information obtained by the South China Morning Post, Dragon Power, a Beijing-based company that generates power from biomass, plans to raise as much as 15 billion yuan (€1.45/US$2bn) from an initial public offering in Hong Kong next year to build not less than 100 biomass power plants across the People's Republic.
China last month increased its targets for bio-power and biofuels (earlier post), and launched an ambitious bioenergy program based on forestry, which, amongst other benefits, helps fight desertification, will reduce coal consumption by 10% and is expected to bring large-scale employment opportunities to the country's vast rural population (previous post). Under the new vision, bioenergy will make up almost 25% of the nation's energy consumption by 2020. As China has become the world's largest emittor of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels (especially coal), development of the biomass sector is seen as a top priority to limit the country's contribution to climate change (an overview of China's biomass power plans and plants here, and here).
Dragon Power this year began generating energy at biomass power plants in Hebei and Shandong provinces, according to a June report in the mainland magazine New Economic Guidance (map), run by the information centre of China's State Council Development and Research Centre.
The alternative power producer started a 50-50 joint venture called National Bio Energy in 2005 with Shenzhen State Power Scientech Development, a subsidiary of the State Grid Corporation, the nation's largest power transmission company. In april of this year, the companies surpassed a symbolic mark when they produced more than 100 million kWh of carbon-neutral electricity. Further, the joint-venture recently started cooperating with bioenergy companies in Sweden to build integrated green power plants there.
Now Dragon Power and National Bio Energy plan to open more than 100 biofuel power plants across the mainland by 2010, generating more than 200 megawatts of capacity, according to the report which cited Jiang Dalong, the president of Dragon Power and a vice-president of National Bio Energy.
The government has so far approved the construction of 29 electricity generation plants driven by biomass, said another executive cited in the report:
energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: electricity :: climate change :: coal :: China ::
US Citibank invested US$150 million in Dragon Power earlier this year, a source said. Citibank declined to comment.
Dragon Power has a distribution contract with State Grid, which made the company attractive to foreign investors, the source said.
State Grid is the country's largest electricity distributor and operates in 26 provinces. China Southern Power Grid distributes energy in five provinces.
The mainland's power grids are required to buy all available power generated from alternative sources from September 1, the State Electricity Regulatory Commission said on its website this month.
The government plans to have 16 per cent of total electricity supply generated by renewable sources by 2020, at a cost of US$198 billion in investment. Coal generates 78 per cent of all mainland-produced electricity.
Beijing in June stopped approving new corn-based fuel ethanol plants amid fears rising grain prices would boost inflation. Ethanol is most commonly used as a car fuel.
Dragon Power uses straw and wood chips to make the fuel used in its power plants, it says on its website.
China Agri-Industries Holdings, which raised HK$3.2 billion in its listing on the Hong Kong stock market in March, had planned to build four corn-based fuel ethanol plants with an annual capacity of 900,000 tonnes. It said it was now switching to sweet potatoes as a biofuel source.
Non-food crops such as sweet potatoes and wood are not affected by the new rule. The four plants are due to begin producing energy this year.
Shares of China Agri, a subsidiary of state-owned Cofco, have risen 27 per cent since listing in March.
Gushan Group, a mainland producer of biodiesel, had planned to raise up to US$200 million from a share sale in Hong Kong last year. That plan was dropped because of uncertainties after new mainland regulations made it more difficult to incorporate assets overseas, although a source said the firm was considering reviving the deal. Biodiesel is a clean-burning fuel produced from animal fats and vegetable oils.
References:
South China Morning Post: Dragon Power plans IPO to raise US$2b for biofuel plants [subscription req'd] - August 7, 2007.
Biopact: China announces 'Agricultural Biofuel Industry Plan': new crops, higher targets - July 04, 2007
Article continues
China last month increased its targets for bio-power and biofuels (earlier post), and launched an ambitious bioenergy program based on forestry, which, amongst other benefits, helps fight desertification, will reduce coal consumption by 10% and is expected to bring large-scale employment opportunities to the country's vast rural population (previous post). Under the new vision, bioenergy will make up almost 25% of the nation's energy consumption by 2020. As China has become the world's largest emittor of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels (especially coal), development of the biomass sector is seen as a top priority to limit the country's contribution to climate change (an overview of China's biomass power plans and plants here, and here).
Dragon Power this year began generating energy at biomass power plants in Hebei and Shandong provinces, according to a June report in the mainland magazine New Economic Guidance (map), run by the information centre of China's State Council Development and Research Centre.
The alternative power producer started a 50-50 joint venture called National Bio Energy in 2005 with Shenzhen State Power Scientech Development, a subsidiary of the State Grid Corporation, the nation's largest power transmission company. In april of this year, the companies surpassed a symbolic mark when they produced more than 100 million kWh of carbon-neutral electricity. Further, the joint-venture recently started cooperating with bioenergy companies in Sweden to build integrated green power plants there.
Now Dragon Power and National Bio Energy plan to open more than 100 biofuel power plants across the mainland by 2010, generating more than 200 megawatts of capacity, according to the report which cited Jiang Dalong, the president of Dragon Power and a vice-president of National Bio Energy.
The government has so far approved the construction of 29 electricity generation plants driven by biomass, said another executive cited in the report:
energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: electricity :: climate change :: coal :: China ::
US Citibank invested US$150 million in Dragon Power earlier this year, a source said. Citibank declined to comment.
Dragon Power has a distribution contract with State Grid, which made the company attractive to foreign investors, the source said.
State Grid is the country's largest electricity distributor and operates in 26 provinces. China Southern Power Grid distributes energy in five provinces.
The mainland's power grids are required to buy all available power generated from alternative sources from September 1, the State Electricity Regulatory Commission said on its website this month.
The government plans to have 16 per cent of total electricity supply generated by renewable sources by 2020, at a cost of US$198 billion in investment. Coal generates 78 per cent of all mainland-produced electricity.
Beijing in June stopped approving new corn-based fuel ethanol plants amid fears rising grain prices would boost inflation. Ethanol is most commonly used as a car fuel.
Dragon Power uses straw and wood chips to make the fuel used in its power plants, it says on its website.
China Agri-Industries Holdings, which raised HK$3.2 billion in its listing on the Hong Kong stock market in March, had planned to build four corn-based fuel ethanol plants with an annual capacity of 900,000 tonnes. It said it was now switching to sweet potatoes as a biofuel source.
Non-food crops such as sweet potatoes and wood are not affected by the new rule. The four plants are due to begin producing energy this year.
Shares of China Agri, a subsidiary of state-owned Cofco, have risen 27 per cent since listing in March.
Gushan Group, a mainland producer of biodiesel, had planned to raise up to US$200 million from a share sale in Hong Kong last year. That plan was dropped because of uncertainties after new mainland regulations made it more difficult to incorporate assets overseas, although a source said the firm was considering reviving the deal. Biodiesel is a clean-burning fuel produced from animal fats and vegetable oils.
References:
South China Morning Post: Dragon Power plans IPO to raise US$2b for biofuel plants [subscription req'd] - August 7, 2007.
Biopact: China announces 'Agricultural Biofuel Industry Plan': new crops, higher targets - July 04, 2007
Article continues
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Decade-long experiment suggests limitations to carbon dioxide 'tree banking'
While a decade of bathing North Carolina pine tree stands with extra carbon dioxide did allow the trees to grow more tissue, only those pines receiving the most water and nutrients were able to store significant amounts of carbon that could offset the effects of global warming, scientists told a national meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA).
These results from the 10 year-long Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) experiment in a Duke University forest suggest that proposals to bank extra CO2 from human activities in such trees may depend on the vagaries of the weather and large scale forest fertilization efforts.
In a presentation delivered on Tuesday, Aug. 7 by Heather McCarthy, Oren's former graduate student, eight scientists working at the FACE site reported on the daily administrations of 1 1/2 times today's CO2 levels and how it has changed carbon accumulations in plants growing there.
The Department of Energy-funded FACE site consists of four forest plots receiving extra CO2 from computer-controlled valves mounted on rings of towers, and four other matched plots receiving no extra gas.
Trees in the loblolly pine-dominated forest plots that were treated produced about 20 percent more biomass on average, the researchers found. But since the amounts of available water and nitrogen nutrients varied substantially from plot to plot, using averages could be misleading:
energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: climate change :: carbon dioxide :: trees :: forests :: carbon cycle :: carbon sequestration :: carbon sink ::
"In some areas, the growth is maybe 5 or 10 percent more, and in other areas it's 40 percent more," Oren said. "So in sites that are poor in nutrients and water we see very little response. In sites that are rich in both we see a large response."
The researchers found that extra carbon dioxide had no effect on what foresters call "self thinning" -- the tendency of less-successful trees to die off as the most-successful grow bigger.
"We didn't find that elevated CO2 caused any deviation from this standard relationship," said McCarthy, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Irvine.
Also unchanged by the CO2 enrichment were the proportions of carbon atoms that found their way to various components of plant systems -- wood, leaves, roots and underlying soil. Only a few of those components will store carbon over time, noted Oren and McCarthy.
"Carbon that's in foliage is going to last a lot shorter time than carbon in the wood, because leaves quickly decay," McCarthy said. "So elevated CO2 could significantly increase the production of foliage but this would lead to only a very small increase in ecosystem carbon storage."
Other FACE researchers contributing to the ESA report were Kurt Johnsen of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, Adrien Finzi of Boston University, Seth Pritchard of the University of Charleston, Robert Jackson and Charles Cook of Duke and Kathleen Treseder of the University of California, Irvine.
Picture: At FACE, computer-controlled valves on rings of towers are administering carbon dioxide to stands of loblolly pines. Credit: Chris Hildreth, Duke University.
References:
Eurekalert: Experiment suggests limitations to carbon dioxide 'tree banking' - August 7, 2007.
Duke University FACE research site.
Brookhaven National Laboratory FACE site.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory FACE site.
Article continues
posted by Biopact team at 5:17 PM 0 comments links to this post