Northern Ireland's oldest creamery, Ballyrashane, today officially opened a £3.5m ground breaking 'green energy' facility that uses organic dairy waste to generate electricity.

According to the Coleraine-based creamery the Anaerobic Digestor plant, which is the first of its kind in Northern Ireland, will transform its business, provide important new income streams for local farmers and sustain current employment levels.

Ballyrashane

Chief Executive Nigel Kemps, told guests who attended the official opening of the plant said: "This is a tremendously exciting and privately-funded initiative which will radically reduce our energy costs as well as generating sufficient electricity to run the entire Ballyrashane facility whilst enabling our processing operation to run completely carbon free."

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The new purpose-built plant sits on a four acre site at the company's existing farm premises near the current Ballyrashane production facility. This plant utilises Anaerobic Digestion (AD) Tank Technology to produce renewable biogas from creamery wastes, energy crops and cattle slurry from local farms. This will generate more than 7 million kWh of electricity and additional process heat through Combined Heat & Power technology. The process will also provide odour free Bio-fertiliser as a by-product for use in local farming production.

The project was designed by the Ballyrashane Creamery Energy Team, headed by Ian Campbell (Operations and Environmental Manager), with analysis and detailed design undertaken by the Carbon Trust Northern Ireland.

Nigel Kemps added: "We are delighted to be the first dairy company in Northern Ireland to invest in this exciting technology. This is a proven process that has worked extremely successfully in other parts of the world."

(CD/GK)