In a move likely to please cheese eaters and green activists at once, a Lake District creamery has received official backing for a plan to use waste products from their cheese manufacturing to produce biogas.
A company called Clearfleau has built an anaerobic digestion plant at the Lake District Creamery in Aspatria, which converts by-products form cheddar production such as whey and effluent into bio-methane.
The plant is intended to reach full capacity by June, at which point they will be using 1,600 cubic metres of by-products to produce around 1,000 cubic metres of biogas– enough to generate around 5 megawatts of thermal energy.
This, they say, is enough to power around 4,000 homes each year.
Of the energy produced, around 60% will go towards powering aspects of the creamery itself, and the remainder will be put back into the grid to power homes and businesses in the local area. Based on the above calculations, this means the equivalent of around 1,600 homes annual energy consumption pumped back into the grid.
The process works by first collecting whey residue and water that has been used to clean cheese-making equipment and plant components. This is then fed on by various bacteria to produce a biogas by means of anaerobic digestion. Once at full capacity, they will be producing around 1,000 cubic metres of this biogas every hour.
Some of this is fed directly back into the plant, while the remainder is converted into purer bio-methane. This is the product that is used to generate energy from the grid and is close in energy producing capability to natural gas found in the North Sea.
The project is viable thanks to large government subsidies; part of a package designed to help us meet carbon reduction targets as set out by the EU and as agreed at the Paris summit last year.
The project will receive its initial funding from a developer called Lake District Biogas, whose director, Gordon Archer, described the plant’s construction as a “major achievement”.
Lake District Biogas will receive close to £2 million every year from subsidies paid for by energy consumers. The project will then receive further subsidies for the energy they produce.
