Spain’s sleeping giant: Biogas, bureaucracy, and that Dutch blending obligation

Buried treasure in the dung heap

Let’s start with some properly intoxicating stats about biogas. According to Sedigas and the European Biogas Association:

• Spain could produce 163 TWh of biomethane per year
• That’s 40% of total national gas demand in 2023 (~400 TWh)
• Enough to heat 10 million homes or power every lorry in the country

And yet, as of early 2024, Spain had just 20 operational biomethane plants. France has over 500, Germany has more than 1,300, and even Denmark produces 30 times more biomethane per capita than Spain.

Here’s our favourite killer fact about biogas in Spain: one single facility, Valdemingómez in Madrid, produces 72% of all biomethane in Spain. A one-plant-wonder in a country bursting with bio-opportunity.

Spain’s animal kingdom

Spain is not short of raw materials. On any given hot sunny day, it is home to:

• 30 million pigs
• 6 million cattle
• 200 million chickens

We like to think of this as an enormous, pungent, noisy zoo, but in reality, of course, these animals are dispersed throughout the country in big sheds. This huge herd of livestock means Spain is among the top four manure producers in Europe, generating 118 million tonnes of livestock manure and slurry every year, plus an easily 20 million tonnes of agricultural residue and 8 million tonnes of food waste.

That’s well over 100 million tonnes of feedstock per year, so you would think the Spanish would be busy collecting it all together in those big sheds, building biogas plants, and cheerfully selling renewable green gas guarantees of origin (RGGOs) to the German industrials. You would think all these things, but you’d be wrong.

Still Ill: Why is biogas stuck in Spain?

In a word, it’s bureaucracy.

Building a biogas plant in Spain is very hard, if not impossible. Planning and permitting routinely take 2–3 years, sometimes 5. The grid access process is opaque, patchy, and heavily skewed toward incumbents. If you don’t already have a gas pipeline running through your land, you’re probably out of luck.

Spain’s equivalent of green gas certificates only launched in 2023, and it is still not easy to export these. 

Taking in aggregate, these things make biogas in Spain very hard. You need lawyers, lobbyists, and the kind of inner calm normally found in Buddhist monasteries.

Given this, it’s no surprise investors have looked to the likes of Germany and the UK. The skies aren’t as blue, there is more beer and less sangria, and the sea is a bit colder, but building a plant in Macclesfield is somehow easier than doing it in Murcia.

That said, the tide may be turning. Building biogas plants elsewhere in Europe is also getting harder. Germany is now saturated with plants, and developers are competing for feedstock. The Netherlands has tightened digestate spreading rules, forcing trucks to export it all the way to Poland. The UK is still a contender, but planning is now almost as painful as in Spain, just with more rain. Pretty much everywhere, feedstock availability is becoming king, and because of that big metaphorical zoo, Spain has it in royal supply.

Spain wakes up: Roadmaps and TWh targets

The Spanish government is (finally) stirring. Under the PNIEC and the Biogas Roadmap, Spain now targets 20 TWh/year of biomethane by 2030, which, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, is a small step up from the previous 10 TWh draft and one giant leap from the current paltry 0.5 TWh/year.

Private players are also on the move:

• Ence plans 50 GWh/year from its La Galera plant and aims for 1 TWh by 2030 (that’s 5% of national production)
• Repsol, through Genia Bioenergy, is backing 19 projects to deliver 1.5 TWh/year, already all locked into a long-term offtake

Interestingly, the biggest driver to invest in biogas in Spain may be policies implemented in France and the Netherlands. Both these countries have recently introduced biogas blending obligations whereby gas suppliers have to “blend” a percentage of biogas into their mix. This decree originally underpinned many biogas business cases in these countries, but the helpful politicians in Brussels declared that imported biogas should be allowed to count against the obligation. So now, if you inject biogas into the grid in Spain, a Dutch gas company can buy those molecules and claim them against their blending requirement. Suddenly, business cases for biogas in Spain became more interesting.

 Final thoughts: Becoming strong at the broken places

In the sprint toward Net Zero, biogas is probably Spain’s most underused, overripe opportunity. It’s local, circular, and could potentially be huge. It has taken time, but patience should be paying off soon.

Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish writer widely regarded as the most important figure in Spanish literature, wrote:

“Trust in time, which often gives sweet endings to many bitter difficulties.”

Spain’s depressed rural economy (with some regions infamously labelled as “la España vaciada” – “the emptied Spain”), its gas grid, and its climate policy have all been stretched and broken in the last decades. Biogas is one way to make them stronger right where they’ve been weakest. It doesn’t just reduce methane from farms or offset fossil gas imports; it creates rural jobs, fortifies the energy system, and offers a 24/7 made-in-Spain solution to the problem of European reliance on gas imports.

Biogas in Spain is finally happening. Maybe not as fast as we would like, but happening all the same. It is often said that a given technology or country is the ‘Cinderella of the renewables world’, but Cinderella actually went to the ball (albeit she didn’t have a ticket, so technically she was a gate crasher). For too long, Spanish biogas has been patiently waiting in the kitchen for a fairy godmother that never came, but she might just have entered stage left.