Biomethane Community: A Research Agenda towards Sustainability

The bioeconomy is an effective solution to align with the sustainability agenda and to meet the pressing calls for action from Cop26 on a global scale. The topic of the circular bioeconomy has gained a key role in the literature, while the theme of energy community is a basic form of social aggregation among stakeholders. This work focuses on biomethane and proposes a framework based on several criteria that are evaluated using a hybrid Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and 10-point scale methodology. The results show that regulation and energy community are considered the two most relevant categories. The overall ranking of criteria sees the stakeholders' engagement as the most important, followed by more significant subsidies for small- and medium-sized plants and the principle of self-sufficiency applied at the inter-regional level. Subsequently, the Italian Adriatic corridor composed of four MMAP (Marche, Molise, Abruzzo, and Puglia) regions is considered as a case study in order to evaluate the possible environmental (854 thousand tons CO(2)eq/year and economic (from 49 million EUR to 405 million EUR in function of plant size) benefits associated with potential biomethane production of 681.6 million m(3). It is found that the biomethane community is an enabler of sustainability and this strategy can be used for sharing different natural resources.

Automated summary

The bioeconomy is an effective solution to address the sustainability agenda and global calls for action. This study focuses on biomethane and proposes a framework to evaluate its implementation based on several criteria. Results show that regulation and energy community are the most relevant factors, with stakeholder engagement being the most important. The case study of the Italian Adriatic corridor reveals the potential environmental and economic benefits of biomethane production.