Ways to Make Money from Farm Biogas Plants

In this article, we list and describe the many “Ways to Make Money from Farm Biogas Plants“.

The remarkable thing about anaerobic digestion (AD) plants, also known as biogas plants, and as “digesters”, is the number of ways they can create an income, and make money, for their owners.

We think that many people fail to appreciate the potential for money making business diversification, and profit, which on-farm biogas digesters can provide.

The following list of income streams can contribute to the economics of individual farm digester projects.

Some apply to making money from Farm Biogas Plants at all digester installations, while others are a matter of choice, or determined by the size or location, of the farm.

Some may not be possible for certain waste types, and as this list is for the United Kingdom, some of these income streams may not be available in your country.

The ways in which financial benefit is possible, fall essentially into two categories.

List 1. Income Created from the By-products of Anaerobic Digestion

First, there are the savings or direct income created by the by-products, including:

1) savings, on the cost of artificial fertilisers for the farm itself, when a farm uses its own digestate as a fertiliser on their own land

2) sales of digested materials, for use as fertiliser, by other nearby farms

3) sale of fibre or finished compost, either through a regional marketing organisation or by distribution locally

4) savings in on-farm energy costs, through the use of gas for heating and cooking

5) the sale of electricity, or biogas, either locally or through the national grids, and

6) the sale of spare heat, from CHP units for use in heating buildings or greenhouses, for example.

List 2. Income Created from Payments and Subsidies for Reducing Environmental Problems

Second, to make money from Farm Biogas Plants, there are payments and subsidies, of one kind or another, for reducing environmental problems which affect the whole community.

These payments could include:

1) gate fees for processing other organic wastes, such as source-separated domestic food waste

or garden waste or possibly sludge from small sewage works

2) incentives for producing renewable energy, either through the Renewable Heat Initiative (the UK scheme was closed in 2022) or Feed-in-Tariffs, (also known as FiTs), for electricity generation, and

3) payments for overall reductions in greenhouse gas emissions

4) sometimes there may even be payments made by governments to encourage farmers to use anaerobic digestion as a way to reduce the burden of farmyard contamination on local watercourses, in areas of intensive dairy farming.

In the next section we explain how this was done in order to clean up bathing beaches on the Solway Firth in the UK in the 1990s:

Anaerobic Digestion Cleans Up Bathing Beaches

In the early 2000s there were even AD project grants given to some farmers close to bathing beaches in Scotland’s Solway Firth, so that biogas plants were built in an area where dairy farmyard, summer storm-water slurry run-off, was jeopardising the tourist industry.

On those local beaches, EU bathing beach water quality in the period after heavy summer storms was significantly improved, by installing anaerobic digestion plants.

Conclusion to this article on “Ways to Make Money from Farm Biogas Plants”

Our conclusion is that you can improve the chances you'll make money from Farm Biogas Plants, by the following:

It is worth the effort to conduct a pre-feasibility study to determine the cost, revenues, and viability of your biogas project, depending on the site-specific features of your farm or food processing company. To learn more about a feasibility study to determine whether your farm or food processing company has a good potential for developing a biogas generator from food waste or organic waste, please contact us at IPPTS Associates.

Establishing effective ways of using all the by-products of a biogas plant, and marketing them in the best manner for maximised income, can raise the income from biogas plants substantially.

A number of forms of government funding (subsidies) are available to help ensure robust economic viability for not only farm biogas plants, but also community biogas projects, and municipal waste-collection authority involvement in the industry.

Governments have been subsidising biogas production, but generally, they need to focus the provision of this money more directly on the environmental benefits of each AD Facility.

By doing that, the contribution of public funds can be best used, to help encourage the use of the biogas process in ways which meet the needs of small, as well as larger farms.

In particular, it is important to bring together as many as possible of these income streams, for each anaerobic digestion plant.

The good news is that, if this is done, many more farmers, on many more farms, should be able to find it possible to profitably install many more biogas digesters.

Thank you for watching our video presentation (above), and reading this article, we hope you found it useful.

You may like to also watch our video on how to raise biogas yield, as another way to improve the income from existing anaerobic digestion plants.

The Guardian Newspaper had the following to say about the ways to make money from farm biogas plants:

The smell of manure is not enticing. Indeed, waste of whatever description is something we tend to avoid thinking about. But as the adage goes: “where there’s muck there’s brass”, and so it is that businesses have always been drawn to this less than salubrious arena to earn money.

Now a new generation of entrepreneurs has plans to alter the way we deal with waste. Using new technologies and techniques, they have uncovered ways to convert it into energy and more efficient fertiliser, reduce methane emissions and pollution, cut bad smells and, as one entrepreneur puts it, “turn muck into money”. via Turning muck into money: the biogas revolution takes off …”

[Article first published January 2017. Updated July 2024.]