The award, called the Harm Grobrügge Award – Biogas Booster, is presented by the organisation European Biogas Association. The prize highlights efforts that aim to advance biogas solutions and their applications for the economy, society and the environment.
“It feels fantastic and deeply honouring to be recognised in this way. For many years we have worked intensively together with other stakeholders to develop biogas solutions and to spread research results to producers, users, decision-makers and the general public,” says Mats Eklund.
He is Professor of Environmental Technology at Linköping University and Director of the Biogas Solutions Research Center (BSRC), a national competence centre that aims to build a strong knowledge base in research and development related to biogas solutions.
Over the years, Mats Eklund has built a centre that stretches across traditional disciplinary boundaries and brings together around fifty organisations in order to develop and highlight the role of biogas solutions in society.
What will you need to focus on in the future?
“Robust technologies are now established. What we need to develop is the identity and narrative around the European biogas model. We have talked a lot about sustainable cities and regions as one theme, and resource-efficient bioeconomy as another. We want to bring these two themes together in one compelling story. That will be one of our challenges over the next five years,” says Mats Eklund.
BSRC is funded one-third by the Swedish Energy Agency, one-third by its academic partners Linköping University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and one-third by participating partners from industry and the public sector.
