Baroness Byford – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Byford on 2014-04-03.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what area was set aside for the growth of beet for biogas production in the United Kingdom, in each of the last three years.
Lord De Mauley
Official statistics on the area of sugar beet used to produce biogas, or energy produced from UK sugar beet are not currently available. The data below shows the production of bioethanol from sugar beet and the land used.
|
Year |
Bioethanol (million litres)1 |
Land used (thousand hectares)2 |
|
15 April 2010 – 14 April 2011 |
68.5 |
13.4 |
|
15 April 2011 – 14 April 2012 |
21.8 |
3 |
|
15 April 2012 -14 April 2013 (provisional) 3
|
59.9 |
10.4 |
1 All sugar beet volumes above were grown on previously cropped land
2 Source: Defra June Survey of Agriculture. UK area at year n-1.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/structure-of-the-agricultural-industry
3 (e) Figures for 2012-13 (Year 5) are as of 15 September 2013 and are not final.
The Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (OfGEM) records have identified two operational anaerobic digestion plants which only use sugar beet to produce biogas for electricity generation.
Defra published an experimental statistics release on the use of crops for bioenergy in December 2013.
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