Glastonbury’s Worthy Farm lines up slurry-to-hydrogen tech

Best known for hosting hundreds of thousands of festival goers each summer, Worthy Farm is also home to around 1,000 cows that produce thousands of tonnes of slurry each year.

Currently, this slurry is combined with waste silage and fed into an on-site anaerobic digester, generating biomethane. Farm owner and festival founder Michael Eavis is now deploying UK firm Levidian’s LOOP technology to convert some of this biomethane into hydrogen and graphene.

LOOP uses a patented low-temperature, low-pressure process to crack methane into its constituent atoms, hydrogen and carbon, without the need for catalysts or additives. On Worthy Farm, the hydrogen will be used as part of a reduced-carbon gas blend for its existing combined heat and power plant.

Meanwhile, the graphene will be sold as an additive that can be used to improve the performance of a wide range of materials including consumer electronics and sporting goods. It’s claimed the installation – deployed by LOOP in partnership with Hexla - will deliver a saving of up to 25 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year.