Landfill gas gears up to power Nissan car production

The car manufacturer has entered into a long-term power purchase agreement to exploit the biogas produced from the new facility at San Nicolás landfill site in central Mexico.

Nissan’s manufacturing site in Aguascalientes is the first automotive plant in Mexico to use electricity from biogas. It is also the first time Nissan has embarked on such a project.

The facility, which makes March, Versa and Sentra cars, will receive 2.475MW of clean energy, sufficient to produce 37,000 vehicles a year.

The initiative also makes the Mexican municipality the first to generate clean energy captured from landfill and represents a £4.4m investment by the ENER-G group through its subsidiaries ENER-G Natural Power and Biogas Technology.

The project should reduce CO2 emissions at the landfill site, which receives household, commercial and industrial waste, by around 90,000 tonnes a year. Around 3.9m tonnes of waste is currently deposited at the site, which has been in operation for ten years.

Commenting on the scheme, Nissan Mexicana’s vice president of manufacturing Armando Avila said: “This project allows us four years to advance the environmental challenges of our program Nissan Green Program 2016 to reduce CO2 emissions.”

The project should also help Mexico deliver on its new Climate Change Act, which commits the country to cutting emissions by 30% by 2020 and to generate 35% of electricity from renewable sources by 2024.

Maxine Perella