Calor Gas is launching biogas delivery services this week, the first large-scale market offer in the Republic of Ireland of the renewable energy source from agri-food waste.

The company supplies customers away from the gas grid, such as pig, poultry and dairy farms using gas tanks, as well as rural homeowners and businesses.

"If you're already using Calor Gas, you can switch straight away, there is no change of settings," the company's sales director Oliver Kenny told the Irish Farmers Journal.

While the new product, branded BioLPG, is more expensive than natural gas, he said this would be largely offset by the absence of carbon tax on renewable gas.

The first shipments of BioLPG, a by-product of biodiesel manufacturing, arrived from the Netherlands earlier this week and Kenny said the company was looking for additional sources: "We're talking to people in Ireland for supplies."

In the absence of current Government incentives for biogas production, however, Neste's Dutch biorefinery will remain Calor's supplier "for the foreseeable future".

While the Government is due to open a renewable heat incentive scheme this year, "we haven't been successful so far" in obtaining eligibility for biogas in the first phase of the scheme, Kenny said.

Unilever

Agribusiness multinational Unilever adopted a similar approach last year, switching to biogas imported from UK supplier GENeco to fuel its iced tea factory in Carrigaline, Co Cork.

While Calor Gas and Unilever's biogas ventures do not currently provide an outlet for energy from Irish farms, the emergence of a market for the fuel including other emerging projects involving Gas Networks Ireland, Diageo and Dairygold may establish the market that was missing when previous attempts to develop farm-based renewables such as miscanthus failed in recent decades.

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