From farm to pharma – A biomethane milestone

At the end of November, Ireland’s first large-scale biomethane facility took another step in the right direction when Carbon AMS, the company developing the plant, announced that it had signed a 15-year gas purchase agreement with Alexion, AstraZeneca Rare Disease at the site of the facility in Duleek, Co. Meath. It means that the pharmaceutical (pharma) company will transition to biomethane to provide all of its heating needs at its Dublin and Athlone operations, making it the first pharmaceutical company in Ireland to switch to renewable gas for heat.

It is a sustainability milestone for the pharma company and at the heart of this story are two farmers, Brugha Duffy and Donal Hartford, and a 7.2-acre field just outside Duleek in Co. Meath. Under the business name Lunderstown Green Energy, operated by Brugha and Donal – Lunderstown, after the location in which the biomethane plant is being constructed on Donal’s farm – both men had a value-added vision for their lands and embarked on a diversification journey a few years back. But it had to be the right kind of diversification.

New direction

Brugha has a suckler and beef enterprise, which he runs on a part-time basis, and he is also a mechanical engineer. His experience in both professions led him to consider the biomethane route. “I was farming in partnership with my uncle and since about 2015, I’ve been effectively running the farm. I was always thinking about where we were going with it and what the long-term goal was. The biomethane option piqued my interest,” he says. 
“It was at the back end of 2018 and I was getting a load of beet off Donal to feed the cattle, and I remember asking if he would be interested. He was and he said ‘let’s give it a go and see how far we get with it’. And that is when we started putting the feelers out.”
As well as being neighbouring farmers and now business partners, Brugha and Donal are also related – their parents are cousins. They go back a long way and their families are deeply embedded in the community in which they sought to construct the biomethane plant. 

Exploration

Pre-Covid-19, Brugha and Donal crossed paths with Pat Harte, chief technical officer with Carbon AMS, a Sligo-based company that specialises in developing ‘grass-to-gas’ anaerobic digestion plants. They operate more than 20 facilities, primarily across Northern Ireland, with some plants also located in Scotland. 
Brugha explains: “We were working with him over the summer of 2019 to the end of that year just teasing things out – what size plant and how to go about it.” 
It became very obvious that if they wanted to pursue the biomethane route, scaling up would be required, as would partnership. He explains: "The cost involved in building a biomethane facility is so high. So we had to scale up to make the plant viable. We had the land bank, but we would need to bring in help with the rest.” They also engaged with Gas Networks Ireland (GNI) in the same year to confirm if a grid connection was possible. 

Going for it

The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic poured water on things for a while, giving Brugha and Donal time to gather their thoughts after the initial exploratory phase, and finally decide on diversification. At the end of 2020, they set their sights on working towards applying for planning permission in 2021, and Lunderstown Green Energy was set up as a single entity to finance this process, which Donal and Brugha had committed to. If it didn’t work out, they were willing to take the hit, says Brugha.
As expected, the planning process for a development like this wasn’t straightforward – ridiculously, it failed the first stage because the planning notice ‘wasn’t perpendicular to the road’ – but it could have been a lot worse, says Brugha: “I can’t remember how many reports and project drawings and surveys we had to do but in terms of what other people have experienced with planning for these type of plants, we were blessed. It went very well and we hadn’t any objections.” A planning application was submitted in December 2021 and was finally passed in July 2022. Only then could things progress with a partner – Carbon AMS.

Feeding the fuel

The biomethane facility is currently under construction and is expected to be completed in 2026, generating the first supply of biomethane towards the end of that year. It will initially produce 42GWh of biomethane, annually. It is the first of its kind in Ireland, and the first in the Republic of Ireland for Carbon AMS. Brugha and Donal remain very much involved in the project. In addition to providing the 7.2-acre site on which it is being built, they, along with other farmer suppliers will feed the plant what it requires – close to 50,000 tonnes of feedstock, annually – with grass silage being the predominant feed but also including maize, beet, farmyard manure, slurry (mostly cattle and a smaller quantity of pig, and only when approved by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine), and distillers’ grains. It will take 2,000 acres of land to grow the feedstocks to fuel the plant, according to Brugha.
“Between the farms at home and the farmers already agreed to work with us – from within a 15km radius – we can supply the majority of what is needed next year. However, once we reach full production, we will need to engage or work with other farmers. And how that will look will vary from farmer to farmer depending on what crops they grow, the acreage involved, and how much work the farmers wanted to do themselves to supply the feedstock,” he says. As well delivering new renewable gas to the national grid, the plant will also supply biogenic CO₂ to consumers, and will incorporate a digestate nutrient recovery facility, also.
“I love farming. I’ve been doing it since I was four years old. However, the economic realities of it mean I’m working as well. So, I want to streamline it, try and get more out of the farm, and hopefully have a better standard of life or way of living.
“For Donal, he has been farming all his life since the 70s and 80s with his father and the prices he was getting 30 or 40 years ago haven’t changed all that much, so why shouldn’t he give this a go?”
Brugha says what they can guarantee any farmer who wants to grow feedstock for the biomethane facility is a price certainty: “Rather than putting in a potentially money-losing crop of spring barley, put in a field of maize, we’ll agree on a price and that is what you’ll get at the end of the year.”