Opportunities and Challenges for Biogas Development: a Review in 2013–2018

Biogas is a recyclable, renewable, and cleaning energy source that can be used directly as a fuel. Due to the rapid development of technology, progress in various aspects of biogas research has been greatly advanced. This study focus on the dynamic changes in the past 5 years, and the purpose is to provide reference for future biogas development. First of all, the article mainly reviewed the advantages of biogas development in three aspects, which fully reflected the positive impact of environment, society, and humanities. These include energy conservation and emission reduction. These include energy conservation and emission reduction, the conduction of guidance on great social atmosphere (the ecological livable social), and the digestate used as fertilizer. Then, the study summarized the risks in biogas development, including pollution and economic disadvantages, which would be the obstacles to biogas development. In response to these problems, this study further refines the advances in biogas purification and harmless treatment technologies in recent years. Finally, the article summarized the international policy background in recent years, and illustrated two typical cases of the developed and developing countries respectively: Germany and China. The results showed that the opportunities and challenges of biogas development were coexisting, but the advantage was extraordinary. Therefore, to maximize the advantages of biogas, not only the technology and policy should be improved, but also the difficulty of economic cost needs to be overcome.