Greening the grid

In 2020, the UK consumed 68.4 million metric tons of gas for heating, electricity generation and industrial processes. The vast majority of this is natural gas, a fossil fuel that is extracted from natural reservoirs underground. It is delivered to UK homes and businesses through long distance pipelines, or shipped in liquid form from the Middle East and elsewhere.

Extracting and distributing natural gas requires large amounts of energy, and as such its use carries a substantial carbon footprint. In addition, methane leaks throughout the supply chain are a significant contributor to climate change.

Yet the UK cannot dispense with gas anytime soon. 85% of British homes use gas central heating, and even the most ambitious plans to replace gas heating with heat pumps or other alternatives cannot be completed overnight. The reality is that for years to come, millions of people will continue to depend on a regular gas supply.

To meet our climate targets, there’s an urgent demand for greening the UK’s gas Grid through more sustainable methods of natural gas production. Apsley Farms has been fulfilling this need for almost a decade.

Since 2012, Apsley Farms has been producing its own biomethane and electricity. Initially, our gas simply fuelled our own activities and allowed us to export some sustainably produced electricity. However, as our business expanded, we were soon able to export biomethane to the UK grid.

Looking at the end-to-end production process, the biogas we produce has just one-twentieth of the carbon footprint of fossil-fuel natural gas. Local production and tightly controlled manufacturing also mean massively reduced methane leakage.

At the time of writing, we are currently the third largest producer of biomethane in the UK. By digesting arable crops that have little economic use for farmers, we now provide around 4% of the UK’s sustainably produced biogas.

The gas we produce is sufficient to heat around 8,500 typical homes, while our exported electricity meets the needs of almost 4000 people. In fact, since we began exporting, we estimate that our activities have reduced the UK’s energy-related CO2 emissions by around 150,000 tonnes of CO2.