Niamh Donnelly
Ireland’s latest energy bet, at least on paper, is a pastoral dream: farm-scale facilities turning waste into so-called “green gas” produced via anaerobic digestion (AD). The AD process is simply microbes breaking down farm slurry, food waste, or grass in sealed tanks to produce biogas (mainly methane and CO₂). When that gas is cleaned to nearly pure methane, it’s called biomethane, which can be used to replace natural gas as a seemingly far greener, renewable alternative. An additional benefit is the leftover mix, called digestate, which can be used as a fertiliser. This circular economy vision tempts us with secure farmer incomes, declining emissions, and a plan to decarbonise our heat sector. In May 2024, the government published its first National Biomethane Strategy. It set a headline target of delivering up to 5.7 TWh of biomethane per year by 2030, roughly a tenth of today’s fossil gas demand, and framed it as a win-win for farmers, industry, and the climate.
Targets matter, but so do the means by which we pursue them, particularly when we consider the specific places in which such developments are most heavily pursued. The rush to scale AD quickly on the back of contract frameworks, network deals, and land-use shifts raises broader questions for Ireland’s “just transition”: at what point does decarbonisation, pursued through new industrial forms of resource use, become a species of “green” extractivism? Do such targets serve as a new frontier for capitalist expansion that reproduces spatial injustices (i.e. unequal and uneven distributions across labour, capital and land)?
While biomethane can play a limited role in a decarbonised energy system, the Irish model emerging around it risks replicating old extractivist logics: concentrating benefits, externalising costs, reorganising land and labour for energy markets, and deepening infrastructural lock-in to gas under a green banner. A more sensible approach is possible, but only if we confront the political economy of “renewable gas” head-on.
The promises: rural incomes, renewable heat, indigenous energy
The selling points arrive ready-made. First, security of supply: indigenous biomethane displaces imported gas and can be injected into the existing network. Gas Networks Ireland (GNI) describes it as a stepping stone to a “net-zero carbon gas network” by 2045, investing a substantial € 32 million in developing an injection point at Mitchelstown in Co. Cork (supported by €8.4 million from the Climate Action Fund). GNI is further considering the acquisition of the existing injection site in the Republic of Ireland at Cush in Co. Kildare. Second, hard-to-decarbonise heat: large industry and many public buildings still burn gas; a Renewable Heat Obligation (RHO) is being designed to force a shift in the fuel mix and create demand for biomethane credits. Third, farm diversification: AD is pitched as an income stabiliser for livestock farmers under climate pressure, a route to monetise slurry, and a market for dedicated energy crops. The National Biomethane Strategy explicitly positions the agriculture, energy, and environment departments as partners in building an AD “industry of scale”.
On each front, the promises are credible to an extent. Slurry co-digestion can reduce methane emissions at the source; nutrient-rich digestate can help close carbon and nitrogen loops if applied carefully; and indigenous biogas can displace fossil fuels in specific niches. None of this is trivial. But the strategy’s framing (“industry of scale” by a near-term date) bends the conversation towards volume, pipelines, and financing mechanisms. The devil is not only in the details; it is in the scale and speed at which those details are made to serve a pre-given target, as well as the spatial justice of such configurations.
The materialities of scale
To reach 5.7 TWh by 2030, Ireland will need significant feedstock and several hundred AD plants. Industry-facing documents and GNI planning papers suggest that approximately 150–200 extensive AD facilities (each with an annual capacity of 40GWh or greater) are expected to be under construction by 2030. Commonly cited land-use estimates are up to 120,000 hectares for energy crops (usually grass silage) in addition to slurry. For reference, the relatively small-scale Teagasc Grange AD plant, with an annual capacity of 3GWh, requires silage from approximately 70 hectares and winter slurry from 1,000 cattle.
These magnitudes are not footnotes; they are system-shaping. Ireland’s agricultural land is already politically saturated with conflict, caught between a nitrates derogation, water quality obligations, biodiversity collapse, and a farm income model tethered to high-emission, export-oriented livestock. Alongside this agri-food and biodiversity nightmare, many rural communities in Ireland are already reeling from top-down environmental governance policies, such as bans on turf-cutting. Diverting grasslands to energy production (even partially, even “seasonally”) further reorganises who the land serves. When grass becomes kilowatt-hours and credits rather than food and fodder, farmers are repositioned as energy suppliers, fields become fuel platforms, and hedgerows, wetlands, and soils are viewed as mere constraints to be optimised away.
Teagasc research has long explored yields from grass and slurry co-digestion, and recent policy statements emphasise “sustainable feedstock sourcing”. But the ecological accounting remains thin in public debate. How will digestate fertiliser be applied without intensifying local nutrient loads? If too much fertiliser or slurry from these projects ends up on fields and in rivers, it can contaminate drinking water, trigger fish-killing algal blooms, and burden nearby communities with the clean-up. If the estimated 120,000 hectares become semi-dedicated to energy silage, what happens to habitats under restoration targets? These are not merely technical questions; these political decisions ultimately determine who stays healthy, who pays, and whether our biogas dreams are genuinely “green”.
Green extractivism, Irish style
Extractivism is not only about mines, rigs, and clear-cuts. Political ecologists describe it as a mode of accumulation premised on extracting large volumes of resources or ecological functions from a territory, exporting value elsewhere, and incurring social-ecological costs. “Green extractivism” refers to the same pattern in low-carbon fashion: land and labour are reorganised to serve decarbonization metrics and climate action policy planning.
Ireland’s biomethane model risks this drift in at least five ways:
- Resource enclosure and monocropping
Scaling AD at speed incentivises uniform, high-starch grass silage and steady slurry streams, challenging claims that the sector will rely mainly on “waste”. Corporate balance sheets prefer predictability; mixed, messy agroecologies do not, particularly amid greater seasonal weather variability driven by climate change. The result can be the incentivisation of growing ‘energy crops’: functional monocultures, green to the eye, but ecologically thin, potentially squeezing out field margins, a direct competitor for land for food production, rewetting, and rewilding. Once silage contracts anchor cash flows, the material logic of growing grass for energy becomes appealing and straightforward. Even with sustainability criteria, the amount of land predicted to be required to sustain this burgeoning biogas industry will subtly reorient farming priorities, pulling both labour and attention into a fuel market and away from restoration and agroecology. - Infrastructure lock-in to gas
Biomethane’s unique selling point is network compatibility. Yet every euro invested in upgrading and expanding gas injection points and trading platforms extends the political and economic life of the gas system itself. Even if the long-term story is hydrogen or electrification, the near-term story is a reinforced gas backbone with influential stakeholders. - Distributional asymmetries and spatial justice
Benefits are typically consolidated with developers, financiers, and network owners. Costs, however, such as traffic, odour, water risks, environmental and landscape impacts, sit locally. Without strong community consent mechanisms, revenue-sharing, and cumulative impact assessments, rural areas can become sacrifice zones in pursuit of national energy targets. - Procedural and recognition deficits
Farmers and communities are invited in as “stakeholders” to a target already fixed. Despite consultation being a formalised (albeit often shallow) prerequisite, agenda-setting remains centralised. The strategy is encouraged by EU strategic policy, informed by industry interests, and co-signed by energy and agriculture departments. Communities themselves remain somewhat insignificant players in this process, signalling a familiar hierarchy: development first, democratisation later.
None of the above risks are inevitable, but they become structurally more likely when industrial-scale timelines intersect with a liberalised, financialised energy system. Ireland’s strategy positions the state as a market-maker: set the target, de-risk the pipeline, establish the certificates, and let private capital take hold. GNI has signed collaboration agreements with developers to accelerate grid connections; legal and consultancy briefings indicate an investable pipeline geared towards 2030. None of that is surprising; it’s the standard Irish development playbook (with the state acting as agent for corporate capitalism). This playbook prioritises upfront capital and speed over fit and care.
The policy machine we actually have is not inherently “bad.” Still, it does sit awkwardly with Ireland’s parallel obligations regarding water quality, biodiversity, and agricultural emissions, as well as with any credible account of a just transition for rural areas and their inhabitants.
Alternatives within biogas: from volume to fit
If we keep biomethane in the mix, the key is to move from volume to fit—from asking “how do we reach 5.7 TWh?” to asking “where does biogas deliver social-ecological value we cannot obtain otherwise?”
It is worth naming the elephant: a 5.7 TWh target is less an ecological ceiling than a political floor for a gas-centred transition. It is attractive precisely because it promises the least disruption to gas-using industries and the gas network. That is why biomethane looms large in discussions about keeping the heating on, even though the fastest and cheapest decarbonisation in buildings remains electrification and insulation, and the deepest agricultural decarbonisation will come from stock reductions, agroecology, and dietary shifts, not from turning more grass into fuel.
Green extractivism thrives when we refuse to engage in these more complex conversations. It invites us to grow our way out of ecological crisis, to build new markets in certificates and credits, and to measure success in terawatt-hours delivered rather than ecosystems repaired and lives improved. Ireland can surely do better.
A different policy design might look like this:
- Waste-first hierarchy with hard caps on the share of dedicated energy crops, prioritising genuine waste streams. Such regulations should be enforceable, not aspirational. Where caps bind, the answer is not to loosen them but to expand non-AD options (heat pumps, deep retrofit, district heating from data centres/waste heat).
- Small-to-medium plants that can supply local heat networks or farm clusters, shrinking transport miles and aligning energy with place. Where grid injection exists, treat it as an overflow, not the business model’s core.
- Support community ownership by channelling public finance toward co-ops and municipal schemes, with golden shares or community vetoes. If the RHO is introduced, reserve a significant portion of the certificate’s value for public-good funds focused on habitat protection, nature restoration, water catchment care, and farmer transition support.
- Treating digestate as a regulated fertiliser or a high-stakes nutrient intervention with transparent registries, soil health baselines, and penalties for mismanagement. Require strict buffer zones for sensitive habitats and water bodies as part of the plant licensing process.
- Joint planning and temporal humility: Map absolute no-go areas for feedstock supply and plant siting. Build cumulative impact assessments into planning law so clusters don’t overwhelm landscapes by stealth. Accept that a smaller biomethane sector might be wiser than a large one rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline. Give priority to demand reduction and renewables electrification wherever feasible.
Such policy designs are not anti-biogas. They are anti-extractivism, while promoting self-sufficiency and environmental sustainability by providing a better fit for rural communities. If biogas is to be a tool for improving rural livelihoods, governance must be anchored locally, promoting a model in which landscapes recover because we ask less of them, not more; where farm incomes stabilise because we value repair, care, and stewardship; where energy use falls overall, and the energy we do need is tailored to the place. In that future, some AD plants will still turn waste into heat and a small amount of gas, but the headline is the rebalancing of needs and limits.
Such an alternative future requires biogas expansion to be transformative, or, at the very least, simply substitutive. In practice, that means recognising the rights of river catchments, peat soils, and semi-natural grasslands not as passive “feedstock constraints” but as living systems. It also means acknowledging farm households’ care work and seasonal rhythms, not just their capacity to deliver biomass tonnages. It also requires internalising risk through robust digestate management, habitat buffers, and caps on heavy vehicle movements, with developer-funded monitoring, feeding into a system of public accountability with the capacity to enforce adaptations and revisions as required. Beyond tick-box planning, procedural justice would also imply veto points for communities, participatory mapping of cumulative impacts, and transparency in contracts and certificate flows. These are not add-ons; they are conditions for confronting the extractivist drift within “green growth” and opting instead for a politics of just rural development.
The current strategy appears likely to establish a new extractive frontier in green packaging, with contracts extracting value from the countryside, and gas infrastructure reborn as our climate saviour. The other path begins with a humbler question: What do our rural communities truly need, and what can they truly bear? If we start there, biogas may find its fit and green extractivism will have less room to take root.
Key context and figures are drawn from Ireland’s National Biomethane Strategy (May 2024), associated government communications, Gas Networks Ireland publications, and sector updates on the Renewable Heat Obligation and grid injection plans. This article is based on postgraduate research supervised by Dr Susan Murphy, TCD, funded by the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice and Research Ireland.
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