Vietnam plant to generate power from waste dump's greenhouse gas
HANOI - A new power plant in Vietnam will use methane gas from an urban waste dump to generate electricity while reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions, officials said Friday.
The Malaysian-Canadian joint venture constructing the three-million-dollar facility plans to profit from the reduced emissions through a carbon trading mechanism set up under the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming.
The plant, to be built next year in the central city of Danang, is the first of several planned in Vietnam by Malaysian engineering firm P.J. International Ltd and Canadian renewable energy company LFGC Corporation.
The companies have said they hoped to build similar landfill power plants in Vietnam's largest urban area, Ho Chi Minh City, the capital Hanoi and the northern port city of Haiphong.
The Danang plant would use gas from the 10-hectare (25-acre) Khanh Son landfill with 15 million tons of waste, said Phan Thi Nu, head of the technical department of the city's Urban Environment Company.
Under the agreement, LFGC plans to sell so-called Certified Emission Reduction units on the international carbon market set up under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto treaty, the Malaysian partner has said.
The Canadian and Malaysian companies are already cooperating in landfill gas extraction and power projects that use waste products from palm oil milling as a fuel for biomass plants, LFGC said on its website.
Rapid economic growth in Vietnam, a country of 84 million people, has driven up industrial and domestic electricity demand, which is growing by about 15 percent a year, and increased pollution and waste.
Global warming and rising sea levels would badly impact Vietnam -- a country with a long coastline and dense population centres in low-lying river deltas -- scientists warned at a Hanoi conference this week.
It would also intensify severe weather events such as typhoons and droughts, the Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and the Environment told a national forum on global climate change, state media reported.
Agence France Presse - May 4, 2007.
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