What is Anaerobic Digestion?

Anaerobic Digestion is considered to be the most appropriate technology for dealing with agricultural and food waste and generating useful renewable energy.
It is the biological thermal treatment of organic waste in a controlled environment, generating biogas for conversion to electricity and heat and also a useful waste bi-product (digestate).

Organic material is fed into the Digester. This material can be a crop (maize is a popular choice), waste product from production, or manure. In fact it can be almost anything, as diverse as vegetable fats and grass cuttings! The material reacts in tanks with bacteria to produce methane.

This in turn powers a CHP (combined heat and power) plant which produces electricity, either for use onsite or for exporting offsite into the National Grid. In both cases, there are attractive financial incentives.

In the production process, there are two bi-products; heat - which can be used locally to prevent the burning of fossil fuels and also digestate - which is the left over product after the methane has been produced.
In most cases digestate is an excellent fertiliser or soil conditioner.