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Ireland’s tillage sector produces around 800,000t of straw, stalks and leaves each year. These crop residues are produced across 290,000ha of cereals and oilseed rape.
The crop residues, mostly straw, can be used as a renewable fuel source, displacing carbon-intensive fossil fuels to produce heat, electricity or transport fuel.
If combusted, this energy-dense material could produce enough energy to heat 280,000 homes per year.
This is according to the new Crops 2030 report published by the tillage crop stakeholder consultative group earlier this month.
Anaerobic digestion
The report also describes how the tillage sector is well placed to provide feedstock for anaerobic digestion (AD) plants.
The sector is also primed to utilise the nutrients and organic carbon from the digestion process to replenish tillage soils that could greatly benefit from organic additions.
Anaerobic digestion is a renewable energy production system that offers scope to utilise organic manures, food wastes and particularly agricultural crops to produce biomethane for injection on to the national gas grid.
AD biomethane can also be compressed for use as an engine fuel or used onsite in a combined heat and power plant (CHP) for electricity and heat production.
In Ireland, there is scope to utilise both high-production grass and clover swards as energy sources. However, development of AD is currently constrained by the lack of a necessary support system.
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