The World Bank has signed its first greenhouse gas reduction agreement in China from a landfill gas project, the China office of the World Bank announced on Thursday.

The World Bank-run Spanish Carbon Fund will buy 635,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in greenhouse gas emission reductions from the project.

Located in north China's Tianjin Municipality, about 80 miles south of Beijing, the landfill gas project will recover gas from the Shuangkou landfill site and use it to generate electricity.

The Shuangkou landfill is the first modern sanitary landfill in Tianjin and receives an average of 800 to 1000 tons of household waste a day.

The project developer, Tianjin Clean Energy and Environmental Engineering Company Ltd (TCEE) will collect landfill gas, half of which is methane and the other half is made up of carbon dioxide and other gases.

The developer will generate electricity by installing a landfill gas collection system, an electricity generation system and a gas flaring system on site.

There are more than 80 cities, such as Tianjin, in China with a population of over one million or more. The residents of these and other large cities discard large quantities of waste that will emit methane.

"The potential for China to develop such landfill gas projects is enormous," said Greg Browder, Senior Environmental Engineer of the WB and task leader of the project.

The landfill gas project is expected to start by early 2008. The gas will be collected in pipes from a series of wells where waste has been deposited. The collected gas will be transported through pipes to a central facility where it will be burned to produce electricity for sale to the North China Power Grid.

According to the TCEE, the project has been approved by the National Development and Reform Commission, the major economic planner of the Chinese government and is now on its way to being registered as a Clean Development Mechanism project.

Landfill gas is the fourth largest contributor to non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions. Methane has 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.