Today, in the Ukrainian
city of Lviv, we signed a contract with the client Lvivvodokanal, a municipal
utility company that is 100% owned by the city of Lviv, for the construction of
Biogas Production and Cogeneration Facilities in Lviv, which is a technically
very comlex project. The project will be carried out in partnership with the
Norwegian company CAMBI, which has the most advanced technological solutions
and highly efficient technological processes for the needs of wastewater
treatment plants worldwide. The project was acquired in an international
competition as part of the EBRD public tender.
The works include the design, construction, commissioning and trial
operation of a biogas plant, the construction of anaerobic digesters, and the
application of the thermal hydrolysis process (THP) for a daily capacity of 120
tonnes of sewage sludge (SS). Two wastewater treatment plants (Lviv 1-2 and Lviv
3-4) are currently operating in Lviv, the former capital of Austro Hungarian
province of Galicia, which today has about 800 thousand inhabitants. Some 100
thousand migrant workers commute in the city every day, and the final treatment
of sewage sludge has not yet been addressed. Upon completion of the project,
the treated wastewater will be safely discharged into the Poltva underground
river, which was the first stream in Europe and the then Austro Hungarian
Empire to be routed through the municipal sewerage system, thus creating the
first centralised sewerage system on European soil.
The RIKO-CAMBI consortium will build a centralised system for the
treatment of municipal sewage sludge, a biogas cogeneration plant, a biogas upgrading facility, gas storage and
all other connecting infrastructure. Newly built facilities must be fully
integrated into the operation of existing plants. The use of advanced THP
technology aims to reduce the carbon footprint, increase biogas production and
reduce the amount of waste. In this way, the treated sludge waste from the
process is completely hygienised, which also enables its use in agriculture.
The construction of the Lviv biogas plant with a design capacity of
approx. 2 mio. PE, will be the first project of this kind in Ukraine thate
generates "green energy". The generation of "green energy"
from biogas, which is a renewable energy source, follows the principles of
sustainable development and leads to a reduction in dependence on fossil fuels.
In the process of anaerobic digestion, the use of THP technology further
increases the yield of the biogas
obtained and significantly reduces the amount of waste sludge produced durng
wastewater treatment. Cogeneration units (for combined generation of
electricity and useful heat) will generate electricity that can be used by the
treatment plant either for its own needs or sent back to the electric grid.
The value of the project, which will be completed by mid 2023, is
EUR 31.5 million and the EBRD will provide the financing together with the E5P,
NEFCO and JFN funds.