Plans to build an industrial complex on the Wiltshire/Gloucestershire border have been delayed because Gloucestershire Council’s highways department were apparently not consulted.

According to the Swindon Advertiser, at a meeting of Wiltshire Council’s strategic planning committee, a council officer admitted Gloucestershire County Council’s highways department had not been included in discussions about the scheme that would attract hundreds of lorry visits a day to their roads. The committee was meeting to discuss plans to construct an anaerobic digestion facility on seven hectares of farmland close to the Gloucestershire border.

The facility would be closer to the Gloucestershire village of South Cerney than the Wiltshire village of Ashton Keynes, and both vehicles bringing feedstock to the facility, and tankers taking the gas away would use Gloucestershire roads – including the B4696 Spine Road, which links the site to the A419.

Councillors were told the facility would process around 91,000 tonnes of agricultural feedstock a year, comprising crops including rye, maize, and grass, straw, farmyard manure, slurry and a small proportion of poultry litter – all of which would be shipped to the site from farms “mostly” within a 10-mile radius, although some would come from further afield.

It would produce around 10 million cubic metres of renewable biomethane a year – enough to supply 9,300 homes. However, that gas would be taken off-site by tanker to Banbury – 45 miles away –  where the applicant has an injection hub into the gas network.

The facility would consist of two 9m (30ft) digesters with a diameter of 45m, and a 16.5m-tall (55 ft) post-digester tank of 34m in diameter. There would also be three silage clamps, a straw processing building, a chicken manure building, a CO₂ capture unit, and two covered digestate lagoons.

The council’s own landscape office has objected to the proposals.

(Picture: Wiltshire County Council)