Eighty-four million euros invested to build a giant methanizer. An industrial scale rarely seen in Haute-Marne. The leaders of the Nature Energy Chamarandes-Choignes (NECC) program were thinking big: their installation would swallow up 129,500 tonnes of agricultural biomass each year, including 100,000 tonnes of intermediate energy crops (Cives) and would produce 148 gigawatt hours of biogas, injected into the National Network.
And now, surprise, one week before the end of the public inquiry, the methanizer project is canceled. “We, the thirteen farmers carrying out the methanization project, have made the decision to abandon the NECC project due to excessive capital constraints”declared Friday April 19 in a press release the group of farmers who were involved.
The affair, however, seemed well underway. The location had been selected: a 12-hectare plot of land located on the heights of Chamarandes-Choignes, a residential commune of a thousand inhabitants, embedded in the Marne valley. As for the industrial and financial arrangement, it relied on the French subsidiary of the Danish company Nature Energy (NE), 100% owned by the oil company Shell. The latter involved more than fifty local farmers and two cooperatives. Among these “farmers”, agribusinessmen from the region who invested in Ukraine in 2006 to create a 20,000 hectare megafarm on the remains of a former kolkhoz.
Climate of hostility
All this led to the creation, at the beginning of 2020, of NECC, whose capital was to be held 51% by farmers and 49% by NE. “Had to”, because the inability to raise the funds necessary to have a majority stake in NECC made them give up. It is true that, between the launch of the project and today, interest rates have increased fourfold. According to NE, it is this sudden increase in the cost of money which has made it almost impossible for farmers to find financing.
But, beyond this financial explanation, the climate of hostility to the project which gradually took hold weighed heavily in the balance. First, many local residents discovered the existence of the methanizer file just a few weeks before the opening of the public inquiry, on March 11, even though the project had been launched in 2019. The investigating commissioner, – himself, had deplored this lack of communication, and organized a catch-up information meeting.
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