European harmonisation of methods to quantify methan emissions from biogas plants

The detection and quantification of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a wide range of emission sources is indispensable for achieving climate protection. The results allow a classification of the environmental impact of energy generation plants (eg biogas plants) and the development of GHG mitigation strategies. The most relevant GHG in the biogas sector is methane. Known sources of emissions from biogas plants are leakages, pressure relief valves, the gas utilization units and open digestate storage tanks. So far there is no uniform, European guideline how the total methane emissions from biogas plants are to be determined. The overall project objective is to harmonize nationally available approaches or methods for the determination of methane emissions from biogas plants in order to achieve comparable and reproducible measurement results, which can then be incorporated into a standardization process.