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 renewable electricity.  From 2014, we started injecting biomethane to grid. Initially, our gas simply fuelled our own activities and allowed us to export some green electricity. However, as our business expanded, we were soon able to export biomethane to the UK grid at scale.  In 2016, we also installed a CO2 capture and liquefaction plant and now distribute our non-fossil derived liquid CO2 extensively to the food and beverage sector.

Looking at the end-to-end production process, the biomethane we produce has just one-twentieth of the carbon footprint of fossil-fuel natural gas. Efficient production and in-house engineering and maintenance also leads to negligible methane leakage.

At the time of writing, we are currently in the top ten of the largest producers of biomethane in the UK. By using arable break crops from nearby farms, we enable farmers to grow sustainable food crops in rotation. We now provide around 1.5% of the UK’s sustainably produced biomethane.

The gas we produce is sufficient to heat around 10,000 typical homes, and we generate all the plant and farm electrical requirements onsite. In fact, since we began exporting, we estimate that our activities have reduced the UK’s energy-related CO2 emissions by around 250,000 tonnes of CO2.