If Italy advances inuse of biomethane, it's also because farmers believe in it. In the countryside they want to work with non-polluting sources and Eni is giving them a hand. Concentrated as it is on the development of this energy segment. It has signed an agreement with Coldiretti for the production of 8 billion cubic meters by 2030. A challenge for farms that will gradually be able to join the network. The products that come out, that arrive on the tables of half the world, do not take advantage of it. But the crops will have done their part.
Farms should be able to comply with the high quantities of biomethane enshrined in the agreement. The national panorama – despite the 8 existing plants – is not at its best, but the road seems to be going downhill. The President of Coldiretti, Ettore Prandini and Giuseppe Ricci, General Manager of Eni Refining & Marketing, signed the agreement. With them also the Undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council Guido Guidesi. The two managers have agreed on a medium-term collaboration.
In the next 11 years they will have to grow the advanced biomethane supply chain: from the field to the pump. Waste from agriculture and livestock will go directly into local tanks for civilian use. “Green gas” they called it and it fits, because the chemical composition is pure. Small plants will be built in the countryside; in those companies that Coldiretti knows by having them among its associates. Eni will in turn take care of transport and injection both into the territorial sales network and into networks dedicated to the associated companies themselves. Farmers, in turn, will have concessions on the use of low-emission fuels in agricultural vehicles.
Agricultural waste will be the heart of the mini plants to cover 12 percent of gas consumption in Italy. The stakes are high, in the years in which the country has to face the transition imposed by the UN agreements. We need gas, but we will continue to study and experiment in those better organized countryside, and which up to now have already taken care of having environmentally friendly productions. It is necessary - Prandini said - to move from a system that produces waste and pollution to an economic model in which waste is also produced by making the most of waste. An evolution equivalent to the overall efforts to modernize Italian agriculture.
