Biogas producer reveals plans for 25 new plants with CCS

Future Biogas has revealed plans to build new 25 biogas plants by 2028, all equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS), while installing CCS at 20 or more existing sites, including a number of the 10 biogas plants it already operates.

The CO2 will be liquefied onsite and transported by truck to a port facility on the Humber Estuary before being shipped to Norway for storage under the North Sea. The company intends to sell carbon credits to corporate buyers looking to offset their emissions.

It has also announced its intention raise £35 million to fund the first stage of the plans by floating itself on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange next month.

“There are 90 plus biomethane plants already operating in the UK so a good number of those are candidates for CCS,” Future Biogas chief executive Philipp Lukas told Utility Week. “It’s just at the moment, there’s no opportunity to do that – there’s no use for the carbon dioxide – so they’re all venting it.”

Lukas said while the carbon dioxide generated as part of biogas production comes from plant matter that was grown the previous year, with maize, rye, grass and sugar beet pulp being the main feedstocks for its digesters, this represents a wasted opportunity to put the greenhouse gas back underground: “Our intention is to go and collect that from existing assets because it’s there and why wouldn’t you.”

He continued: “A lot of them are run by farms and estates on their own or companies that have one plant to deal with their waste and it’s question of saying we’d like to take your CO2, pay you a little bit of money for it and then liquefy it and aggregate it together for a sequestration facility.”

He said biogas plants can be fitted with carbon capture equipment for relatively little extra cost: “You’re looking at increasing the cost of building the plant by around 10 per cent or so because it’s quite an easy bolt on to the existing activity of preparing biomethane for the grid.

“The exercise of taking biogas that you’ve fermented in your big digesters and scrubbing it up to pipeline quality gets you most of the way there. It’s just liquefaction at the back end that you need to add and that doesn’t increase the cost that much.”

He said a typical biogas plants produces around one lorry load of liquefied CO2 per day.

Lukas said they also expect to be able get a good price for the carbon credits they sell particularly as “rather than being avoid emissions, it’s actually negative.”

He continued: “We think there’s going to be lots of demand because what we’re delivering is high grade carbon removal with permanent geological storage and that sets it apart from many other forms of carbon offsets, which whilst they’re completely valid, whether it’s forestry or biochar or emissions avoidance, don’t have the same level of permanence and removal.”

The sequestered carbon will be shipped to the Northern Lights storage project in Norway which is being already built by a joint venture between the oil companies Equinor, Shell and Total with funding from Equinor’s owner – the Norwegian government.

“Construction is well underway,” Lukas explained. “They’ve already got the reservoir and the well head. They’re now on with building the portside facilities in Norway, the temporary storage and the subsea pipeline network to get it out to the well.”

He said the project is expected to be commissioned in mid-2024 and Future Biogas is hoping to deliver its first cargo by the end of that year.

Lukas said they are aiming for 200,000 tonnes of CO2 per year from 2025 onwards, rising to between 600,000 and 700,000 tonnes per year by the time the last of its new plants is completed in 2028. He said there is potential to equip CCS to more than 100 biogas plants in the UK, adding: “Clearly that requires a bit more collection infrastructure for the CO2.”

He said Future Biogas is also in discussions to supply CO2 to CCS projects in the UK, in particular the Humber Zero cluster in which Equinor is also involved as a partner.