On Monday 23 January, Nature Energy inaugurated its biogas plant in Kværs west of Gråsten in Sønderborg Municipality. The plant can convert 500,000 tons of biological waste from agriculture and industry into more than 20 million cubic meters of biogas annually, displacing a similar amount of fossil natural gas from the energy system.
Lars Aagaard, minister for Climate, Energy and Utilities, took the opportunity to emphasise the importance of being independent of fossil natural gas and of being self-sufficient with a stable energy supply.
With ProjectZero, Sønderborg Municipality has an ambition to reduce the entire municipality's CO2 emissions to zero by 2029 and at the same time create new skills and green jobs in the area.
Biogas fits well into this plan, said Sønderborg Municipality's chairman of the Committee for Business and Green Growth, Kjeld Stærk:
"The war in Ukraine has only made it more necessary to exercise due diligence in our energy solutions. The production of biogas is an important source of energy, and there are many good rationales for biogas, since we exploit a resource that would otherwise be wasted.
"At the same time, biogas helps solve agricultural CO2 emissions, and it helps us in Sønderborg Municipality achieve CO2 neutrality in 2029.
"However, the process of locating the biogas plant in Kværs has highlighted the need for citizen involvement. It poses a threat to the entire green transition and is something we must work all the time to become better at solving if we are to succeed with the green transition, which is absolutely essential for all of us."
At the same time, biogas is part of the circular economy because the degassed biomass is returned to agriculture as fertiliser that contributes to tomorrow's food production.
This is a win for both agriculture and the green transition, explained Martin Lambert, chairman of the suppliers' association, which supplies manure and deep litter to the biogas plant in Kværs:
"In agriculture, we do everything we can to reduce our climate footprint and the local farmers' contribution to yet another biogas plant's start-up clearly shows that farmers already take the task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions seriously, he says and points out that the degassed biomass that agriculture gets back is often a better fertilizer than the raw manure."
Sun, wind and biogas
Biogas is a renewable energy source because it utilises the CO2 and methane that would already have ended up in the atmosphere.
Henrik Høegh, chairman of the Danish Biogas Association, pointed out that it is important for both the climate and security of supply that biogas production in Denmark is increased.
"You have now contributed with yet another biogas plant that supplies green gas to the gas grid with its large gas storage facilities.
"From the storages, biogas can in the future become an important back-up that can supply green power when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. We received a strong reminder that it is important with this back-up for a good week in December, when it was bitterly cold and windless," Høegh said.
But biogas not only contributes to ensuring the supply of renewable energy, said Ole Hvelplund, CEO of Nature Energy:
"Biogas is absolutely necessary in the green transition. Trucks and ships can use biogas as an energy source, the biogas can easily be stored and moved and as long as there are people on earth, we need something to eat and this inevitably provides waste products for biogas production," he noted. At the same time, we solve a waste problem, concluded Hvelplund.
Minister inaugurates Nature Energy’s 13th biogas plant in Denmark
