Green gas trimming carbon this Christmas

Green gas will be cooking your giblets this Christmas and for many festive seasons to come.

Thanks to rapid growth this year, with a quadrupling of biomethane-to-grid plant numbers from 10 to 40, more households are cooking with home-grown green gas than ever before. Today the anaerobic digestion industry generates 31,000m3/hr of biomethane alone, which is enough energy to cook EVERY Christmas dinner in the UK on Friday.

ADBA’s Chief Executive, Charlotte Morton, commented:

The UK can have a clearer carbon conscience as they tuck into their Christmas turkey this year. A quadrupling in biomethane deployment in 2015 means the industry can generate enough green gas to cook the Christmas dinner for every household in the UK – and it has done so while creating jobs, improving energy security, decarbonising our heat and farming sectors, enhancing farm resilience and improving food production.

With an early Christmas present for the industry in the form of a re-commitment to the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) over the next five years, biomethane capacity will continue to expand and generate the additional indigenous gas to heat our homes and to keep warm food on our tables.

There’s plenty on our Christmas wish list to ensure that anaerobic digestion capacity continues to grow, but for now industry can toast its achievements in 2015.

Please note that calculations are based on the following methodology:

• Biomethane capacity currently stands at 31,000m3/hr
• 31,000m3 biomethane equates to 11,063,078 therms.
• A gas oven uses 0.112 therms per hour
• So if a turkey takes about around four hours, it will use about 0.5 therms to cook in a gas oven
• 11,063,078 therms divided by 0.5 = the equivalent of 22 million turkeys could be cooked on biomethane
• 10m turkeys were consumed in 2013 – so we have green gas left over for the trimmings too.