SEVILLA/MADRID, 28 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Naturgy has joined forces with Kepler Engineering and Ecogestion to build its sixth biomethane production plant in Spain and the first in Andalusia in the municipality of Utrera (Seville), the company reported.

Specifically, the Utrera project, currently in administrative processing, will be one of the largest of the group chaired by Francisco Reynés, with an annual production capacity of 40 gigawatt hours (GWh) of biomethane, a high-quality renewable gas with qualities comparable to those of natural gas, with which the supply of more than 10,500 Andalusian homes could be covered. The facility is scheduled to begin operation in 2025.

This is the first renewable gas project that Naturgy promotes in Andalusia, the second autonomous community in terms of biomethane production potential in Spain due to the large volume of agricultural and livestock resources that can be treated to obtain biomethane.

The Utrera plant will be able to recover 68,000 tons of waste from agriculture and livestock each year, promoting the territory's circular economy and its transition towards a more sustainable economic model.

The project will have an evolved anaerobic digestion technology that will allow it to obtain the most efficient renewable gas due to its Hyperthermophilic Biological Pretreatment Unit, which translates into a series of operational advantages such as the possibility of treating fibrous and fatty materials, the reduction of time in the digestion process and obtaining biogas with a higher percentage of methane.

The renewable gas obtained in the process will be injected into the network of Nedgia, the gas distributor of the Naturgy group, for consumption by homes and companies.

Naturgy already manages more than 60 biomethane projects in different phases of development. In operation, the company has two of its own production plants: one located in the Bens WWTP (A Coruña) and another located in Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona). These will be joined in the coming months by a third that is currently in the final phase of construction, located at the Porgaporcs livestock farm in Vila-Sana (Lleida), and three more that are in the pipeline in Torrefarrera (Lleida), Utiel (Valencia) and Utrera (Seville).

In addition, it recently signed an agreement for the acquisition of all biomethane production from the Vallés Oriental Bioenergy project (BioVO), located in the Barcelona municipality of Granollers, as well as the full production of the first BioLNG project in Spain to promote the decarbonization of the transport.

For its part, Nedgia, Naturgy's gas distributor, now has six biomethane plants in operation injecting into its network infrastructure and an additional portfolio of more than 200 projects in different phases of development that will allow it to incorporate new production of this gas. renewable in the short and medium term.