Renewables and biomethane lead the charge
3 min read
As the government announces its aim to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions, former Labour MP Natascha Engel explores how biomethane can play a role in helping the UK meet its net-zero targets
The Prime Minister has just made an important announcement at the global climate change conference in Baku. By 2035, Great Britain will now aim to reduce its carbon emissions by 81 per cent when compared with 1990 levels.
This comes hot on the heels of Labour’s mission to decarbonise our electricity generation by 2030 − a target which the National Energy System Operator said would need a ‘Herculean effort’.
When taken together, the targets will need technology deployed at a speed and scale never-before-seen. For clean power by 2030, that means trebling offshore wind, doubling onshore wind, and trebling the amount of solar we have today.
That’s nearly 1,000 km of onshore and nearly 4,500 km of offshore network (cables, pylons and substations) with planning decisions needed and projects started at startling speed.
As any MP reading this will know, infrastructure, be it housing, roads, pylons or solar farms, is not always greeted with open arms by residents, particularly in rural constituencies.
With so much extra wind and solar on the system, we also need to think about what happens when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining, just as happened when we experienced a lengthy dunkelflaute recently − literally meaning dark and calm.
Gas was doing a lot of heavy lifting just as we were all turning on our heating again, showing just how dependent we still are on fossil fuels.
Last year, 77 per cent of all the energy we used came from fossil fuels. That’s because they are dispatchable: easily stored, transported and quickly brought online when they are needed to step in for intermittent renewables.
The scale of the challenge is huge, and it means that every option needs to be on the table.
This is where biomethane is playing an important role. Biomethane is a renewable gas that has been generated and fed into the gas grid for over a decade.
“Biomethane is renewable because it recycles carbon that is already in the atmosphere”
Last year, of the 705 TWh of gas that we used, 7 TWh came from biomethane. It is growing rapidly and could replace up to 100 TWh of natural gas by 2050.
It is made from organic materials like waste, agricultural by-products, rotational crops and sewage broken down in anaerobic digesters, leaving a residue of valuable digestate that can be used as fertiliser.
Biomethane is renewable because it recycles carbon that is already in the atmosphere or was very recently. Although the UK is the third biggest biomethane producer in Europe, France is ahead of us − and is helping us learn their lessons. France turned in part to biomethane because the infrastructure that came with electrification was opposed in some parts of the country.
In contrast, biomethane is popular with farmers and the projects are community-based using the existing underground pipeline infrastructure − far less disruptive, and much quicker and easier to get going. Renewable but identical to the gas flowing through our pipes today.
Biomethane may be less part of the net-zero discussion than hydrogen, but it is already part of the answer.
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