Biomethane and beyond: is the UK missing out on a big opportunity? (spoiler alert, yes)

The comfort of that first working answer

The UK biomethane sector is built on first working answers. Take organic waste. Digest it in big tanks. Clean the gas. Burn it or inject it into the grid. Move on.

We now produce roughly 7–8 TWh a year, with policy ambition stretching that to 10–15 TWh by the early 2030s. Respectable numbers, until you remember the UK still burns something like 750–850 TWh of gas annually. So yes, the needle has moved. Just not very far.

Underneath that is a slightly inconvenient detail. Biogas isn’t really “gas”; it’s a mixture: roughly 55–60% methane and 40–45% CO₂. To make it ready for the fussy National Grid, you have to strip out CO₂ and, most of the time, vent it.

This is usually justified as “circular carbon”. The CO₂ came from the atmosphere; it goes back to the atmosphere. No harm done. It is circular, provided you count the edge of space as the boundary of your circle. That said, a few plants now capture their CO₂ and sell it to the food industry, but most don’t. And “most” is a different word from “few”.

What if we don’t stop at biomethane?

Biomethane is already an improvement on fossil gas. But treating CO₂ removal as the end of the story is a bit like accepting the first job offer and deciding that the Civil Service must be your career.

Yes, biomethane works. It moves the decarbonisation dial a little bit, so let’s call it there. But what if we keep going? What if it’s a question mark and not a full stop? Methanol could be the answer to the next question: “If we’ve gone to the trouble of separating out the CO₂, why not use it?”

The slightly awkward chemistry bit

As you will recall from school, methanol is CH₃OH: one carbon atom, four hydrogen atoms, and one oxygen atom.

We already have the carbon and oxygen sitting in the CO₂. What we don’t have is the hydrogen. This is essentially a game of chemistry Countdown, but with atoms instead of vowels and consonants.

If we add back hydrogen, the equation looks reassuringly simple:

CO₂ + 3H₂ → CH₃OH + H₂O

In practice, it involves a lot of heat, pressure and catalysts. But none of this is new. Methanol synthesis is a mature industrial process. The only novelty here is where the CO₂ feedstock comes from.

Efficiency, or something like it

At this point, someone will sigh and say, “Yes, yes, Michael, but what about energy efficiency?”

Injecting biomethane into the grid to burn for heat is maybe 90–95% efficient, which is pretty good. Turning CO₂ and hydrogen into methanol is, well, not quite that.

Methanol contains roughly 20 MJ per kilogram. Producing might take 40–50 MJ of energy per kg, sometimes more.

On paper, it looks like a terrible idea: putting 50 MJ of energy in to get 20 MJ back.

But that assumes the energy going in is scarce and valuable. Increasingly, that’s not always true. A large part of future hydrogen could be produced from curtailed renewable power.

In the UK today, wind curtailment is already in the order of 5–10 TWh per year. It is projected to rise significantly as offshore wind capacity expands faster than the transmission and storage bits of the system can handle the electrons. This curtailed energy could be as much as 18–36 petajoules (PJ) of energy annually. Which, hey presto, we could use to make hydrogen and run the process for our methanol factory.

Flexibility beats efficiency

Methanol has a big part to play because we don’t use energy for one thing anymore. Gas grids are brilliant at one job: delivering heat. Everything else involving that gas is awkward.

Methanol is different. It’s a liquid at room temperature. You can store it, ship it, move it, and use it to power things that can’t be attached to pipes or cables. Like ships and trucks. In the rock, paper, scissors game of modern energy systems, flexibility often beats efficiency. Methanol is your flexible liquid friend who goes to Pilates, compared to your other gaseous friend who goes to the pub.

Demand is not the problem

Global methanol demand is already around 110–120 million tonnes a year and rising every day as industry moves from announcing net zero targets to reluctantly trying to meet them.

Shipping is the interesting bit. Shipping has spent a long time quietly keeping its head down while everyone else tries to reduce carbon emissions. As we have discussed in previous blogs, they are not going to get away with that much longer.

Shipping knows this.

People in shipping are, by definition, good at spotting things on the horizon and changing course accordingly. To date, over 300 methanol-capable ships are now in build or on order. Mixing our metaphors horribly: once shipping starts buying, methanol demand will really rocket.

Using the carbon we already have

At the current UK biomethane output of 7–8 TWh per year, you end up with roughly 400,000 – 500,000 tonnes of CO₂. Which we mostly vent to the atmosphere.

If you captured it and converted it, you could produce approximately 250,000 – 300,000 tonnes of methanol per year.

The hydrogen required would equate to roughly 15–20 PJ of energy input, depending on how you design the system. Conveniently, that’s not far off the energy we already curtail from wind.

At this point, I can imagine my colleagues who work on hydrogen schemes composing angry Teams messages to me. They want that curtailed energy to make hydrogen. So do we, but we don’t want to stop there. Hydrogen as an energy carrier is difficult; it’s a gas, it’s very small, so it’s leaky, and it goes bang with alarming frequency. Going one step further and turning it into methanol is a lot more sensible.

The economics: no longer ridiculous

For a long time, bio-methanol sat firmly in the “interesting but uneconomic” category.

Renewable methanol made with renewable energy currently lands somewhere around EUR 350–700 per tonne, depending largely on hydrogen cost. Fossil-based methanol is closer to EUR 200–300 per tonne.

The gap is no longer vast. It’s the sort of gap that policy, carbon pricing, or emissions standards can plausibly close, particularly in sectors like shipping where alternatives are limited.

The UK habit of stopping too early

In the UK, we are great at inventing stuff, then letting other people (mainly Americans) run with it. The telephone, the internet and the jet engine – all invented by clever Brits, but the full potential was realised elsewhere.

There is a risk that the same thing will happen again with biomethane. After the Germans and the Chinese, we have the third-largest number of plants in the world. We know the UK biomethane sector works. It produces gas. It meets targets. It generates certificates. It puts renewable gas into existing infrastructure. It works properly, but it could be much more interesting.

The next obvious step is to capture the CO₂, blend it with hydrogen produced from curtailed wind energy, and make methanol for shipping. It’s not easy, or straightforward, but as the little magnet on my fridge says: “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone”.

Making it happen

The key is probably merging carrots and sticks into a coherent energy policy soup. We already incentivise biomethane production with the Green Gas Support Scheme, legacy ROCS and FiTs. What we don’t do is encourage anyone to use the resulting CO₂ or discourage plants from venting it, which is where the merge bit comes in.

Give shipping and trucking either a carrot or a stick to use methanol and simultaneously start penalising biomethane producers who don’t capture their CO₂. Probably easier to write in a blog than to do in practice, but that’s the point of policy, to pull disparate threads together rather than rely on market forces.

 Not stopping at good enough

 I still think about that first job. Sometimes my first wife, too. Not because they were mistakes, but because they felt like complete answers to questions I hadn’t fully asked. Energy systems sometimes do the same thing: stop asking questions too early.

Biomethane-to-grid is a perfectly sensible answer. Clean, incremental, defensible. But it is still an answer that risks becoming an endpoint. Methanol is what you get when you ask: “Yes, but what about that CO₂stuff going out the pipe?” Given current UK biomethane volumes, the next step is roughly 300,000 tonnes of methanol per year that could be made from CO₂ we are already producing but just not using properly.

We can keep things as they are: biomethane in, circular CO₂ out, keep saying “circular, not additional”.  Or we can take one more step and turn that CO₂ into a flexible liquid fuel to power trucks and ships. Neither path is wrong. But the former assumes the first acceptable answer is also the final one, whereas the latter asks, “Yes, but what else could we do next?”

Energy systems, like lives, rarely fail because they start badly. They fail because they stop asking questions about that next step too early.