The new plant design, currently being put to the test in a prototype plant in Germany, is said to be highly modular and economically viable even at the small scale.

The production of biogas? – ?gas created by the breakdown of organic matter, by fermentation or through the action of anaerobic bacteria? – ?is an interesting complement to other sources of renewable energy since it can not only generate electricity at little cost to the environment, but also create biofuel, fertilizer and engine oil. One issue, however, is that these plants only accept few organic substances as raw materials.

A new biogas plant developed at the Fraunhofer Institute could solve this problem by taking a number of materials that would normally have to be disposed of at great cost (like industrial biomass waste, sewage sludge, straw, scrap wood or manure) and process them with high efficiency into a more useful output, all through a highly modular, flexible design.