On-farm anaerobic digestion uptake barriers and required incentives: A case study of the UK East Midlands region

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Highlights

  • On-farm uptake of anaerobic digestion in the UK is low.

  • In the UK East Midlands region, multiple barriers to uptake are identified.

  • These are institutional & political, lack of awareness, and economic & technical.

  • Multiple responses are therefore required to provide a holistic solution to improving uptake.

  • These include coordinated information, planning, access to finance, and stable policies.

Abstract

On-farm anaerobic digestion (AD) can deliver renewable energy, improved management of farm wastes and the production of fertilizer, offering cost-savings, environmental improvements and potentially also revenue generation. The research reported here provides an in-depth exploration, in the UK’s East Midlands region, of the factors behind the limited uptake of on-farm AD, compared with other on-farm renewable energy sources, and what stakeholders would like to see to change this. Data collection has been undertaken in three stages – a questionnaire sent to farmers, 18 interviews with stakeholders from the industry and policy sides of the AD debate, and a stakeholder workshop. The many barriers identified were grouped into political & institutional, AD awareness, and economic & technical. A range of incentives and policy responses are identified to increase on-farm AD uptake, notably coordinated information gathering and dissemination, streamlined planning processes, improved access to finance, and stable policies.

Introduction

The United Kingdom (UK) is at the forefront of efforts to tackle climate change and promote renewable energy (RE) transitions. It committed, in the 2008 Climate Change Act, to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 35% below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% by 2050, (DECC, 2012).1 This domestic commitment exceeded its international obligations: a 20% reduction committed to via the 2009 European Union (EU) Renewable Energy Directive (RED); the 2018 revised RED (RED II), with renewable energy targets for 2030; and the Kyoto Protocol.2 By 2017, UK GHG emissions were already 43% below 1990 levels (Committee on Climate Change, 2018).3

Under the RED, the UK committed to delivering a 15% share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption by 2020 (see BEIS, 2019a, for the UK position on targets through to 2030, related to RED II).4 By 2017, the UK had achieved 10.2% (BEIS, 2018b). Energy generation data (BEIS, 2018a) show that renewables had about a 24% share of the total in 2017. Within that, roughly 50% of electricity generation came from renewable sources, but the contributions of different RE sources vary considerably. According the data from BEIS (2018a), by 2017, RE generation was dominated by wind (50%), solar photovoltaics (12%) and bioenergy (32%), with bioenergy dominated by plant biomass (20% of total RE).

Of the RE technologies available, we focus on anaerobic digestion (AD), specifically on-farm AD. AD ‘is the process by which organic matter such as animal or food waste is broken down to produce biogas and biofertilizer. This process happens in the absence of oxygen in a sealed … tank’ (BIOGEN, 2018). This technology has been used to treat sewage sludge for over 100 years (DECC/DEFRA, 2011, p. 5), but its use as a source of RE remains modest. In 2017, AD contributed 8% of UK bioenergy generation, just 2.5% of total RE.

This limited deployment is significant because, in addition to its use for treating sewage sludge (Gregson et al., 2015), AD can generate electricity via the disposal of wastes (Bywater, 2011); offering farmers a new source of income (Massaro et al., 2015). Waste management is particularly significant for agriculture, where pollution incidents from animal wastes are a major problem. The Environment Agency (2018, p. 13) reports that agriculture is in the top 3 of regulatory sectors for pollution incidents – and the only one showing an increase in incidents in 2017–18, of 13%. AD is an established technology that can be used to generate RE via the management of highly polluting on-farm wastes. It creates for farmers income-generating and cost-reducing opportunities which can make AD economically sustainable whilst enhancing the environmental sustainability of energy generation and agricultural production in the circular economy. Given the range of positive benefits available from AD, the present study seeks to understand the reasons that may lie behind the limited on-farm deployment (see also Röder, 2016), considering also questions around the future governance and policy options for sustainability.

On-farm AD has received some attention in the existing literatures on RE, AD and waste management, but these studies have tended to focus on a very narrow range of issues. Several studies focus on the technical aspects of AD, including Achinas et al. (2017), who analyze the technical opportunities of generating biogas from lignocellulosic wastes; Komilis et al. (2017), who analyze the literature on methane yields from AD systems which utilize food wastes; Lijó et al. (2017), who analyze the emissions and environmental impacts of different feedstock combinations and digestate production; and Yang et al. (2017), who explore how the AD process can be manipulated in order to produce more methane. We build on a much smaller body of literature, which takes a qualitative social science perspective, in two important ways. First, most of the contributions to this literature, detailed in Section 2, adopt a single method of data collection in their research design. In contrast, we take a mixed methods approach to primary data collection, utilizing a large-N survey, small-N interviews and a workshop (as detailed later). This permits a deeper exploration of the factors that might affect the uptake of on-farm AD. Second, most studies have a focus that is very narrowly defined ex ante, in terms of the issues with on-farm AD that they concern themselves with.5 Rather than pre-define our specific research focus, we ask research questions that allow us to explore the full breadth of the multiple challenges facing the increased uptake of on-farm AD. These innovations represent the key methodological and empirical research gaps that we address.

In keeping with the limited literature, we focus on one UK region: the East Midlands region of England. Given the importance of AD as a potential solution to waste management as well as RE generation, this region represents the median in terms of English regions’ shares of livestock and pig numbers (albeit with a higher than median share of poultry – data for all English regions are presented in Appendix Table 1). It therefore represents an important illustrative case study in the UK context of potential AD utilization.

From the foregoing and to give focus to our analysis, we identify three research questions:

  • 1.

    What barriers affect on-farm AD uptake in the East Midlands?

  • 2.

    What incentives and support mechanisms are required to increase the number of on-farm AD projects in the East Midlands?

  • 3.

    What are the perceptions of stakeholders in the East Midlands of current UK policy measures, planning and regulatory regimes around on-farm AD?

In Section 2, we review key relevant literature. Section 3 provides details of our research design and methods of data collection. Section 4 presents the detailed analysis and discussion of our survey and interview data. Section 5 concludes the paper with a summary of the key implications from our findings and suggested directions for future research.

Section snippets

Literature review

Research on AD is located within a number of overlapping literatures, including general studies on AD, broader studies of on-farm RE, and general studies on RE. Several studies look at different countries, or undertake a cross-country comparison. In what follows we focus on studies looking at on-farm AD in the UK, except insofar as other studies offer particular insights relevant to our research questions.

Research design and methods of data collection

We adopt a three-stage mixed methods research design, to obtain the necessary range of information from relevant stakeholders to be able to offer answers to our research questions. This approach to obtaining complementary information from different stakeholders via multiple methods, distinguishes this paper from most of the literature. As dictated by our research questions, we obtain some numerical data, but mostly we seek discursive, qualitative, data.

First, we adopted a survey design and

Results and discussion

Our research design and research questions focus on a qualitative understanding of key issues around on-farm AD uptake. In this section, we start with an overview of findings based (mainly) on the closed questions on the questionnaire. We then undertake a content analysis of responses to the open questions on the questionnaire, and the interview data, triangulated against the discussion at the workshop and, as appropriate, the academic literature.

Conclusions

By exploring the barriers to AD adoption in the UK, through an in-depth qualitative investigation in the UK’s East Midlands region, we have determined the breadth of barriers to on-farm adoption. We have triangulated our findings internally, across questionnaire responses, interviews and a workshop; and externally with reference to the (very limited) literature. Some differences in concerns emerged across stakeholder types – notably farmers being more concerned about the year-round supply of

Funding source

This study was funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme small research grant SG142461, SRG Round 2014–15.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Rob Ackrill: Formal analysis, Investigation. Hafez Abdo: Formal analysis, Investigation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

We thank the British Academy for their financial support allowing us to undertake this study. We thank Mofakkarul Islam and Julia Davies for their support for this project. We thank Professor David Smith, Dr Ghassan Zubi and Mr David Hunt for providing valuable feedback and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We thank the three referees for their comments and the Editor for guidance and support through multiple rounds of revisions. Any remaining errors and omissions are our responsibility.

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