A new report from the Methane Matters coalition – a consortium of civil society organisations – finds that The EU has handed the biogas industry billions of euros of public money to expand, without ensuring adequate environmental controls.
The consortium warns that without an environmental impact assessment, the EU’s unchecked rush to scale up biogas and biomethane production risks locking in pollution, fuelling industrial livestock farming, and undermining climate goals.
The findings come as ‘Biomethane Week’ gets underway in Brussels and reveals a lack of oversight that opens the door wide to perverse incentives and harmful side effects, including methane leaks from biogas plants, increased air and water pollution, manure feedstocks increasing intensive animal rearing, and the possible lock-in of fossil fuel use.
The report recommends that EU policymakers ensure appropriate regulation of the biogas sector by undertaking an immediate environmental impact assessment of the RePowerEU target, and calls for the immediate cessation of any public funding until this has been completed.
More:
- The largest French offshore wind farm is being built off the coast of Normandy
- New gas routes from Greece via Bulgaria to Ukraine
- Taxing Farmers Because Their Cows Emit Gases – A Real Solution to Climate Change?
Key findings
- Not a single EU policy analysed sufficiently mitigates the potential negative environmental and social impacts of biogas and biomethane production in the region.
- The Biomethane Industrial Partnership (BIP) has opened the door for industry to set policy on biogas and dictate what is considered sustainable.
- Industry interests are positioned to receive 37 billion euros of public funding for biogas projects, with no environmental impact assessment.
- The biogas rush has led to further 28 billion euros in private investments until 2030 risking being locked into unsustainable biogas production and creating long-term climate and financial risks. The three largest recipients of this investment are Spain, Denmark, and the UK. Spain and Denmark both have significant industrial animal agriculture operations wreaking havoc on local pollution and water quality, while the UK promotes the use of manure as a feedstock.
- The EU treats manure as a ‘zero emissions’ waste product, ignoring emissions from enteric fermentation and land-use change. Since 2019, the use of manure as a feedstock has increased. Subsidies could replicate US-style incentives that led to a 3.7 percent increase year-on-year in livestock herd sizes. Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the UK all actively incentivise manure as a feedstock.
- There is no EU-level regulation of methane leakage from biogas plants. Current estimates suggesting around 5 percent of methane in supply chains in the EU is lost to leakage. In Germany, for example roughly 300,000 tonnes of methane are estimated to be lost annually, equivalent to about 24 million tons of CO₂. While Denmark, Germany and the UK do have national regulation for leaks, these are inconsistently applied and recent investigations have shown leaks continue to occur. No plans could be found for Ireland, Poland or Romania.
- The biogas rush enables greenwashing, as fossil fuels are mixed with methane to make biogas for the grid, delaying the phase out of fossil fuels.
