Published at 15:33, Wednesday, 25 November 2009

RENEWABLES are the new agriculture at a West Cumbrian farm, where they plan to turn Sellafield’s chip fat into bio-diesel and pig slurry into electricity and organic fertiliser.

James Stanley from Ponsonby Hall Farm, near Calderbridge, wants planning permission to build a £1million anaerobic digester.

He already has a bio-diesel plant up and running. An application to build a digester at the farm will be submitted to the Lake District National Park Authority planners this month and, if given the go-ahead, it will be a county first.

It will cost £1.1 million to build and could be up and running in nine months.

The farm already has a working bio-diesel plant capable of turning the 10,000 or so litres of used cooking oil from Sellafield’s six canteens each month into eco-fuel.

Talks are on-going with Sellafield over the used oil and Mr Stanley is eventually hoping to sell the bio-diesel to Cumbria County Council when the plant is fully operational.

Once built, the digester will supply heat to warm the cooking oil for the bio-diesel and in exchange a glycerol bi-product from this process will accelerate anaerobic digestion and electricity production.

Slurry from 800 pigs housed at the farm will go into the digester, as well as silage and possibly other crops grown on around 500 acres. This would be harvested by machines run on the farm’s bio-diesel.

As well as electricity and heat, the digester will produce organic fertiliser, which could be used on the farm and sold.

Mr Stanley is not alone in wanting to build an anaerobic digester. There are around six individual projects already being mooted in the county, including one at Blackdyke, near Silloth.

“Everybody else we have spoken to is looking to do this in groups of six to seven farmers,” said Mr Stanley.

“I’ve never met six farmers who could sit round a table and agree on anything, so we decided to go it alone.

“We’re lucky in that we have such a large area of land and we don’t have a particular farming activity going on, so we can be very flexible.”

Published by http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk