Darragh McCullough
IN the scramble to cash in on solar panels, wind turbines, willow and miscanthus plantations, it seems that the millions of tonnes of slurry from our massive livestock industry have been overlooked.
But with just weeks to go before the Government finally launches its renewable energy feed-in tariff (Refit) scheme, Irish farmers could be looking at their slurry reserves as the next frontier in energy generation.
It’s not before time, with just three years to pull the country back from the brink of fines stretching to the hundreds of millions. By 2020, Ireland is required to be producing 16pc of our energy requirements from renewables — we will be fined a whopping €100m for every 1pc we go over this. At present we are at 8.6pc.
Due to the huge investment in wind and solar, we are already close to our target for electricity.
However, we’ve hardly made a start on heat, hence the concerted effort to roll out major incentives to turbo-drive investment in the area over the next three years.
The blueprints are already provided. Germany has reached saturation, with close to 8,000 biogas plants built on farms all over the country over the last 20 years.
If anything, the subsidies were too good — digester owners drove prices for land and conacre around their facilities through the roof in their bid to secure feedstocks. German banks loved the concept and were giving 100pc loans to developers.
One of those was Irishman Billy Costello. Along with his brother and sons, the Costellos run a large 3,000-sow unit alongside a sizeable dairy farm in the former East Germany.
He put up two digesters and has leveraged that experience to construct a third on his Irish pig farm at Nurney in Kildare.
The €5m unit is big enough to generate enough electricity to power 500 houses, and is a prime example of the potential for Irish farms to get a slice of the energy market.
The farm produces 75,000 pigs annually, but it has developed a second income stream from the gate fees it charges on the 23,000 tonnes of food waste that come through the farm annually.
This waste can be anything from slaughterhouse offal to beans and frozen pizzas — often perfectly edible with nothing more than a flaw in the labelling.
This is one ingredient for the soup that powers the digester, but it is the 16,000 tonnes of slurry that keeps the process on an even keel.
While some of the gas captured from the digester can be used on site by generating both heat for the piggery and electricity from a combined heat and power (CHP) unit, the real goal is to purify the methane and pipe it directly into the national gas network for large corporations to access.
Companies such as Diageo and Glanbia are some of the biggest gas users in the country, with up to 70pc of their energy requirements totally dependent on fossil fuel in the form of gas. However, corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals require these massive users to convert sizeable chunks of their energy use to renewable sources.
This is where the big opportunity for farmers lies.
Gas Networks Ireland are already in discussions with 12 separate farming entities, including one potential coop in Claremorris, with a view to establishing digesters and purification plants to capture gas from slurry and pump it directly into the national gas network.
Currently there are only a handful of digesters operational on Irish farms.
In contrast, more than 70 farms in the UK have jumped on the biomethane bandwagon in the last 24 months. But both Britain and Ireland are way behind other northern European countries in the biogas stakes.
“Some Scandinavian countries such as Sweden have close to half of all their gas requirements sourced from renewable sources such as biomethane,” said Ian Kilgallon (pictured below), the innovation and business development manager at Gas Networks Ireland. He already has plans for similar units across rural Ireland.
“We are looking to replicate the co-op structure that already exists in places like Denmark. This could be a new rural industry where several farms in an area collect gas from their slurry, pipe it to a local purification unit, where it is injected into the national network.”
He believes the new Refit tariff due to be unveiled next month will allow farmers who are willing to invest €100,000– €300,000 in digester facilities to get a 5–7 year return on their investment. Larger facilities that include purification plants would require investments of at least €1m.
Some of the added benefits of digesters include a lower pollution load in the resultant slurry digestate due to the removal of the most harmful greenhouse
gases.