Anaerobic digestion: a prime solution for water, energy and food nexus challenges

Abstract

We solve the problem of identifying one or more optimal patterns of anaerobic digestion (AD) installation across the UK, by considering existing installations, the current feedstock potential and the project growth of the potential via population, demography and urbanization. We test several scenarios for the level of adoption of the AD operations in the community under varying amounts of feedstock supply, which may arise from change in food waste or energy crops generation via other policies and incentives. For the most resilient scales of solutions, we demonstrate for the UK the net energy production (bio-gas and electricity) from AD (and so the avoided emissions from grid energy), the mass of bio-waste processed (and avoided land-fill), and the quantum of digestate produced (as a proxy for avoided irrigation and fertilizer production). In order to simulate the AD innovation within WEF nexus we use agent based modelling (ABM) owing to its bottom-up approach and capability of modelling complex systems with relatively low level data and information.