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An engineered natural solution to extract carbon from the atmosphere and return it back into the geological reserve for long-term storage.
About
The Lapwing Estate manages nine farms across Nottinghamshire, North Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire. Throughout our 130-year history, we have continuously evolved and innovated in response to changing market and social trends, and now we have a new vision as we work to reinvent our produce growing model. Lapwing Energy is the renewable energy side of the business developing this innovative new approach (Reverse Coal) which will enable us to sustainably intensify production of high-quality, healthy food, whilst at the same time delivering net gains for the environment.
The premise of Reverse Coal is that we rewet agricultural lowland peat and establish short rotation coppice willow. The biomass is then harvested and fed through a pyrolysis plant to produce biochar and generate renewable energy. We then bury the biochar, locking carbon back in the ground. The high-grade heat and power will be used to power controlled environment agriculture for more sustainable food production.
Key Benefits
Reverse Coal delivers a wave of UK policy objectives:
- Contribution to Net Zero Strategy: Our novel Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) solution contributes to achieving net zero emissions by providing bioenergy and carbon storage while maintaining food security. This also prevents emissions from the current land use and food production system.
- Job Creation and Investment: Implementation of our project at scale is expected to create over 5,500 jobs directly and indirectly, stimulating the regional economy through a multiplier effect in the supply chain.
- Enhanced Food Security: The development of vertical farms and high-tech glasshouses improves food production capabilities, allowing for import substitutions and increasing resilience against climate change and supply chain disruptions.
- Increased Food Productivity: Through a combination of vertical farming and Dutch glasshouse technology, our project offers a proven solution to significantly reduce total UK food imports, aligning with recommendations from the Dimbleby report. CEA methods are expected to achieve over 10 times the productivity of traditional field farming, ensuring sustainable food production for the future.
- Rewetting Peat: Scaling up our project contributes to the government's target of restoring 35,000 hectares of peatland in England. This restoration effort aligns with the aims of DEFRA's natural capital grant scheme, promoting ecosystem health and biodiversity.
- Flood Risk Mitigation & Water Balancing: Peatland restoration serves as a natural flood management technique by slowing the movement of stormwater into river channels, mitigating flood risks and helping to balance water levels.
- Water Purification: Utilising paludiculture and sequestered biochar as biofilters helps clean water diverted from Rivers Idle & Torne, removing nitrates from the aquifer and supporting river ecosystems, ultimately creating a safer environment for the public.
- Biodiversity: Paludiculture activities, including biomass harvest and water table management, promote wetland conservation and support nature reserves by providing cost-effective management options for biomass removal, enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem resilience.
Applications
To supply fresh produce year-round to TESCO with the smallest environmental footprint whilst also providing carbon credits to aid in decarbonising hard to decarbonise areas of the food production system. We are also offering space and renewable energy for specialist growers to co-locate with us!
The Lapwing group has actively engaged in lowland peat recovery discussions with DEFRA. This showed that a considerable proportion of Lapwing's land bank constitutes lowland peat with extremely high soil carbon respiration rates.
There are various target markets identified based on the various products produced and generated from this system:
- Food produced from controlled environment agriculture will be targeted towards food processing customers who are looking for consistent, high-quality fruit and vegetables with controlled nutritional value. Food produced from controlled environment agriculture can streamline existing supply chains by reducing the handling steps and removing the need to wash and freeze produce.
- The biochar produced through pyrolysis can be sequestered in the ground for long-term storage, and this can be verified and sold as a carbon credit on the developing carbon market. We are also exploring opportunities to use biochar as a replacement to coking coal in the steel industry. The steel industry is very interested in the carbon-negative credentials of biochar to decarbonise the industry.
- The wider landscape change from Reverse Coal unlocks a broad array of ecosystem services that can be monetised and sold.
We are in discussions with local councils and stakeholders to understand how Reverse Coal at a larger scale can fit into local policy as well as wider national objectives.