German town pools produce for biogas

Lunen’s farms pool produce for biogas

A small town near Dortmund is setting up the world’s first dedicated biogas network, to convert waste products and feedstock from local farms into fuel for heat and electricity. The system will use gas collected and cleaned in anaerobic digesters (ADs) to feed combined heat and power units dotted around Lunen, a small town of 91,000 people in northwest Germany.

Local farms will deliver waste matter such as animal manure, as well as maize, wheat and grass, to anaerobic digesters, which use bacteria to convert some of the material into biogas. This is then filtered to exclude pollutants like sulphites and arsenic, and sent at high pressure through a network of pipes to ten combined heat and power units around the town.

The annual output of the network is expected to be around 2.5MW, providing approximately 50% of Lunen’s heat and power needs. It costs around €18 million and comes onstream in December.

So could this model be reproduced elsewhere? Madeleine Lewis of Farming Futures – a communications project for farmers and land managers hosted by Forum for the Future – thinks so: “Biogas makes great business sense and benefits the environment”. But the UK’s lagging far behind its potential, with just 13 on-farm AD plants compared to Germany’s 3,500. “British farmers tell us they need more information and incentives to invest in AD, such as access to capital grants, faster planning processes, and demonstration projects,” added Lewis.

The Goverment is beginning to address these issues through its AD implementation plan, backed by an online information portal, launched by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in September.

Farmers are missing out on opportunities, says Owen Yeatman, a UK-based dairy and arable farmer who set up the company Farmergy to fund his own AD plant, which now exports electricity into the grid. “Everyone who is a good farmer can be a good biogas producer,” he told Green Futures. “It’s still a production industry and farmers can use all their own resources, assets and skills.” – Alex Johnson

10 December 2009

Alex Johnson