New stakeholder actions and cooperate-design concepts for enhancing a future development and dissemination of the biogas technology in Denmark

This paper emphasizes the barriers of implementing biogas plants in Denmark and highlights the many advantages of the technology as far as environmental, energy and agricultural related benefits, and showing the importance of a further biogas development. The most important current barriers are difficulties in providing alternative gas boosters to the scares organic industrial waste, how the market for biogas can be enlarged, and where to locate future biogas plants due to resistance in local communities. To overcome these obstacles for the implementation of the biogas technology we stress the need for new and existing stakeholders to engage more actively in the biogas development. Thus, we propose that municipalities, energy companies and farmers take renewed action and become drivers and facilitators for the biogas sector. Municipalities must for example provide enhanced energy planning supporting the implementation of biogas plants, e.g. in their heat planning, whereas energy companies should benefit from the new market opportunities that biogas poses in e.g. distribution of bio-natural gas. Farmers on the other hand must look to alternative ways of implementing biogas plants, through new cooperate-design concepts, as opposed to the traditional centralized and farm biogas plants established. Suggestions are provided in this paper.