ContourGlobal will begin producing power from methane gas extracted at Lake Kivu in Rwanda after securing funding for the plant.

ContourGlobal country manager Jarmo Gummerus told Bloomberg that KivuWatt, the Rwandan subsidiary, will generate 25MW of electricity when the facility is commissioned in July 2012.

The $400m project will help ease the power crisis in the country and is expected to produce 100MW more than the current national capacity by 2015.

Lake Kivu on Rwanda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo contains more than 2 trillion cubic feet of methane trapped at the bottom, enough to generate 500MW of energy for the next 40 years.

About 100MW may be accessed indefinitely, as the lake naturally generates the gas.