The peat briquette: A potted history of an old Irish favourite

The peat briquette was invented to meet a lack of coal in the wake of the second World War. The idea, in essence, was to copy geology and compress peat to as near to coal as possible.

Briquettes are made from milled peat, which has been mechanically dried and pressed under high pressure in a factory to form the briquette shape.

Turf is peat which has been extracted from the peat bog by machine and cut into a rectangular shape. It is then air-dried naturally during the summer.

Ireland’s peat bogs have been exploited by man for millennia but it was not until the 17th and 18th centuries that sustained efforts were made to use them for farming. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they came to be seen as sources for fuel.

By 1970, 800,000 tons of peat was being compressed into 315,000 tons of briquettes, sold in 12.5kg bale of approximately 24 individual briquette pieces.

Power plants

Production of briquettes now is more than 200,000 tons per year and the compnay has a stock-pile of 60,000 tons, its highest to date. In the 1930s the government of the then Irish Free State set up the Turn Development Board, progenitor of Bord na Móna, which was born in 1946. The plan then was that peat would be supplied to two ESB turf-fired power stations and 24 bogs would produce over a million tons of sod-peat per annum.

Over time, nine peat-burning power plants were in operation. Six are closed – Bellacorick, Lanesborough, Shannonbridge, Ferbane, Rhode and Port Arlington – but three remain: Edenderry, Lough Ree and West Offaly (rebuilt Shannonbridge).

West Offaly is the largest peat burning station and was identified by the EU-IMF troika as a “non-strategic asset” that the State should sell. It produces 153 megawatts of power and was put up for sale in 2013.

Source: heartland.ie and Peatland Utilisation and Research in Ireland, The Irish Peat Society, (2006), ed. CA Farrell