Biomethane needs breathing space too, and this Budget offered little

Biomethane needs breathing space too, and this Budget offered little
By Cameron Ball, External Affairs Lead, Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association (ADBA)  

The Chancellor promised a Budget that would restore hope and give squeezed families and businesses some breathing space. For one of Britain’s most proven green energy industries, it delivered neither. This week’s Budget – focusing on “Breathing space for today and fresh hope for the future” – found £27 million for hydrogen, a fuel whose place in heating our homes and powering our industry is still being tested in trials and feasibility studies.  

It found nothing for biomethane, the green gas that is already flowing through Britain’s gas grid today, already heating homes and already cutting emissions. Biomethane goes straight into the existing network. It needs no new pipes, no new boilers and no change in how households use energy.  

The Green Gas Support Scheme has done exactly what it was designed to do. It has attracted investment, brought plants online and grown the amount of green gas in the grid. It has worked so well that it has hit its budget cap and is now frozen.  

Biomethane is now being held back for being successful. Even the government must admit this is a strange way to run policy: encourage investors through the door, then close it once they arrive. 

The consequence of this lack of action is a queue. Around a dozen biomethane plants are waiting for the cap to be lifted so they can start building. Behind each one are developers, farmers, councils and investors counting on them.  

The Chancellor says he wants to give businesses the stability they need to plan for the future. Businesses have done the planning; what they lack is the stability.  

Every month the sector is forced to wait, costs continue to rise and finance grows nervous. If Britain does not give these projects certainty, other countries will, and the investment, the jobs, the gas and the net zero contribution will go with it. 

The last few years have shown the price of depending on imported gas, shipped across oceans and priced by events far beyond our control. Every unit of biomethane produced here is a unit we do not have to buy on volatile international LNG markets. It is home grown, it is reliable, and it runs day and night whatever the weather. A government that talks rightly about energy security should be the first to back it. 

Millions of homes and much of British industry will rely on the gas network for years to come, and some of that demand will be among the hardest to electrify. Biomethane decarbonises the gas we will still be using while also cutting emissions from agriculture and waste, two sectors where progress has been slow. 

None of this is an argument against hydrogen: there is a sensible case for investing in it. But a serious energy strategy backs what works today while developing what might work tomorrow. The Budget did the second and ignored the first. 

The fix is not complicated. The government should lift the Green Gas Support Scheme budget cap urgently so the projects in the queue can get building, and set out a clear long-term framework beyond the scheme so investors can plan with confidence. Do that, and a stalled pipeline will quickly become construction sites, rural jobs and billions of pounds of private investment, ultimately producing green gas that lowers our exposure to global price shocks. 

The government wants this to be remembered as a Budget of hope and breathing space. For biomethane, breathing space means lifting a cap that is suffocating a scheme that works, and hope means backing British energy in every postcode with a farm, a food waste plant or a sewage works ready to produce it.  

Ministers do not need to back a new technology not yet operating to strengthen Britain’s energy security and hit their climate targets. They need to stop holding back the one that is already working hard to make it happen.