£4m government funding awarded to UK biomass projects

A £4m government funding pot has been awarded to 24 projects across the UK that aim to increase biomass production.

Biomass is used for low-carbon renewable energy generation and is considered a key part of the UK’s plans for tackling climate change.

Materials include non-food energy crops such as grasses and hemp, material from forestry operations and marine-based materials such as algae and seaweed.

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The projects, which include growing algae using wastewater from breweries and dairies, increasing yields of grass varieties and accelerating the breeding of willow trees, will each receive up to £200,000 from the Biomass Feedstocks Innovation Programme.

Funding recipients include:

• Rickerby Estates, Carlisle – more than £150,000 to look at scaling-up the harvesting of willow crops using new technology such as automated processing machinery that is controlled by GPS satellite guidance systems.
• Green Fuels Research, Gloucestershire – more than £190,000 for a project that will allow microscopic algae to be produced for biomass using wastewater from breweries and dairy industries.
• Aberystwyth University, Wales – more than £160,000 for its “Miscanspeed” project, researching ways to improve the breeding of high-yielding, resilient miscanthus, or elephant grass – grass varieties that are well-suited for biomass use – in the UK.
• J George trading as Hej Harvester, Gloucestershire – more than £130,000 for its project, “Harvesting Agricultural Hedges for Biomass Production”.
• Teesdale Environmental Consulting, County Durham – more than £60,000 for “Teesdale Moorland Biomass”, a project that will investigate harvesting commercially viable biomass products from naturally generated moorland crops that are currently burned in situ as part of annual land management practices.  

To see the full list of recipients, visit the gov.uk website

The programme is being conducted in two phases. In the first, suppliers will receive full funding to produce robust project plans for innovations that would improve the UK feedstock supply.

In the second phase, projects that progress will enact their plans by constructing, operating, testing, refining and evaluating the innovations, and having a clear commercialisation route for deployment.

Energy minister Lord Callanan said: “Working to develop new and greener types of fuel like biomass is an important part of building the diverse and green energy mix that we will need to achieve our climate change targets.

“We are backing UK innovators to ensure we have a home-grown supply of biomass materials, which is part of our wider plans to continue driving down carbon emissions as we build back greener.”

The UK government intends to publish a new biomass strategy in 2022, which will review the amount of sustainable biomass available to the UK and how this could be best sed across the economy to help achieve the government’s net-zero and wider environmental commitments.