At the invitation of the Danish government, Senior Managing Director of Strategic Energy Initiatives, Tom Murphy, recently joined representatives of the PA Department of Agriculture, for a week in Denmark to investigate community-based energy models that could be successfully incorporated into the Commonwealth’s agricultural landscape. Team PA is investigating the European ecosystems in circular economies with close agriculture and energy partnerships. Denmark, which is leveraging agricultural and other biomass-to-biomethane conversion processes to meet the natural gas needs of its population of 6 million, is a critical model. Its increasing output of green hydrogen production is also planned to fuel the hard-to-abate industries of that nation.

At the same time, we are working with academic, industry, and government agency partners to assess and promote outreach to stakeholders interested in investment and final deployment of these technologies. We know that agriculture production can create an abundance of carbon-reduced energy opportunities, and new federal tax incentives encourage commercial scalability. These are just a few developments that have inspired Team PA’s research and fact-finding around a complicated, but potentially beneficial convergence of energy and agriculture.