European Union regulation will substantially increase the use of renewable energy as a source for heat and energy production. Furthermore, the EU requires Member States to significantly increase the use of biogas in the transport sector, from a share of 0.2% in 2022 to 3.5% in 2030.
To increase the use of biogas and biomethane has created a need to ensure gas quality by measuring impurities such as siloxanes, ammonia, halogenated hydrocarbons and hydrogen chloride. For this purpose, Important standardization work has been carried out and two separate Standards (EN 16723-1:2016 and EN 16723-2:2017/2018) now establish maximum allowed levels of siloxanes in biogas for grid injection and traffic fuels.
One of the fundamental issues in green gas utilization is to determine the maximum levels for siloxanes in biogas. These limits – less than 0.3–1 mg/m3 for grid injection and less than 0.5 mg/m3 for traffic use – will in practice require biogas producers to verify the siloxane levels with new online monitoring tools. Earlier methods of bag samples and laboratory testing will not offer sufficient speed and accuracy of testing. Therefore, biomethane plants are expected to shift their siloxanes testing to online monitoring, such as the NDIR monitoring technology provided by the Qualvista solution offered by Sensotec Instruments.
Qualvista Biogas Monitor QBM–100 provides the biogas and biomethane industry an integrated continuous, cost-effective and robust method to measure biogas contaminants such as siloxanes and gas components like methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide and oxygen. The system enables the monitoring of biogas either on demand or by regular intervals as defined by the user. The real-time monitoring will help Sensotec Instruments’ customers to verify the quality of biogas and biomethane, as well as optimize their maintenance intervals for both purification systems and gas engines or turbines.
The QBM-100 solution has a modular structure that allows you to analyze siloxanes, VOCs, CH4, CO2, H2S and O2 at multiple measuring points in one system. At detection limit of less than 0.1 mgSi/m3 for total silicon level, it provides the biomethane industry a solid online verification of biogas quality. Grab/bag sampling is inherently a slow and unstable methodology which will not offer the necessary information of current siloxane levels for continuous and on-time process and gas quality monitoring.