Watch: Biomethane company to do 'long-term deals' with farmers
The managing director of Nephin Renewable Gas, Graeme Lochead has said that his company is hoping to do "long-term deals" with farmers to produce foodstock for its facilities.
Lochead was a panelist at the Nephin Biomethane Day conference in Dublin today (June 25).
The managing director told Agriland that farmers can get "decarbonised benefit" from biomethane.
He said: "Farmers can get involved in a variety of ways. We’ll be looking to do long term deals with aggregators and individual farmers to produce foodstock into our facility.
"We’ll be looking to start that process by matching the market, then continue that in indexed linked scenarios, in order to produce and supply into our facility."
"We need crop, we need land, to put the digestate back onto. That helps the farmer. If a farmer gives us his slurry, and we give back the digestate, there is a relationship and a contract for that, they will get the decarbonised benefit. So they can go to the dairy companies and say, 'look this is our contributor to decarbonisation'," Lochead added.
According to Lochead, Nephin Renewable Gas is one of the biggest suppliers of Irish natural gas into Ireland.
He claims that it produces about 40% of Ireland’s natural gas requirements. Its aim is to decarbonise, and bring in renewable gas so that gas created from organic waste or agricultural waste can create a replacement for long term decarbonisation.
Lochead explained: "What we’re looking to do is grow a sustainable business that can service multiple plants over all of Ireland. We’re not restricted to one county.
"Nephin Agri will be our link between ourselves and the farming community, and the feedstock community."
"The food waste plants would be the waste that you and I produce. That is the food waste we throw in the bin, that we now recycle. That will be any food waste, from restaurants, oils, whatever," the Nephin managing director added.
Another alternative, is a process for co-digestion of agri-centric waste, which is targeted at farmers.
He said: "We take slurry, cow slurry, poultry manure, waste products from the dairy industry. That might be the waste product from the way we permeate cheese.
We put them into the facility, and we do the same thing, we produce a methane from that. That’s a co-digestion, agri-centric facility. What that means is, we need carbon."
"All of that produces nitrogen. In effect, we give our AD (anaerobic digestion) plant, which is a biological process, the same way our stomach works, and if you give it too much nitrogen it gets stomach ache. So it needs a carbon," Lochead added.
