While the earlier project is to go before a public inquiry because of local objections, the company is hoping its revised proposal might gain a swifter green light.
It is being put before local residents and businesses for consultation, before going to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) for government approval, around the end of November.
The proposal includes a materials recycling facility, a gasification plant to produce electricity, reprocessing equipment and plasma melters to recover material such as glass and metals from mixed inorganic material.
The application has been submitted to the government rather than the council, because it must be considered under the Electricity Act rather than local planning frameworks, due to the amount of energy it is likely to generate.
The proposed site is land next to the Fengate Industrial Estate in Peterborough and is the second energy park application that PREL has submitted to BERR.
The previous application for the Fengate site received objections on grounds of location and size from Peterborough city councillors, when the government asked for the council's views in 2005. As a result, this application has now been scheduled for a public inquiry so government inspectors can fully look at all the evidence from all sides, before making its judgment.
Waste infrastructure development in the UK is lacking significantly and we need to get the facilities built. We have a duty of care to our own country to provide solutions here.
Chris Williams, PREL
PREL has said it wants to go with the second and most recent option it has proposed – which is much smaller – but is unwilling to cancel the pending public inquiry for the first application until the second has been approved. The company is worried it could end up with neither proposal being approved and having to start its application again from scratch. However, there is the possibility Peterborough council may agree to the second application rather than run the risk of government approval of the larger plant against its will.
The first proposal submitted by PREL was in partnership with New Zealand waste management firm Global Olivine. It included an energy-from-waste plant capable of processing one million tonnes of material each year, to produce 126MW of energy. Councillors said the proposed location was the wrong place and that the project was too large.
The new plant proposed is almost half the size of the original proposal. It has the capacity to process 650,000 tonnes of material each year, producing 58 MW of energy, with 45MW exported to the national grid. PREL said the latest smaller scheme was also refocusing on biomass combustion through gasification rather than incinerating mixed waste.
The company's managing director Chris Williams said one of the most important features of the energy park is that it can achieve zero waste to landfill by turning all substances used in its processes into useable products on-site. He explained this was important because too much waste material from the UK was shipped abroad for final reprocessing.
The managing director added: “Waste infrastructure development in the UK is lacking significantly and we need to get the facilities built. We have a duty of care to our own country to provide solutions here.”
If the second application is approved, construction is likely to begin in 2009, with the plant scheduled to be up-and-running by 2011. It will take commercial, industrial and agricultural waste although if any local authority contracts are put out to tender, the company will consider bidding.
Technology
PREL's plans for the Peterborough site include a materials recycling facility which will sort the biomass portion of waste from the non-biomass, through use of trommels, eddy current and magnetic separators, as well as equipment to separate plastics and glass.
The biomass will be fed into one of eight “combustion chains”, where it is gasified – converted to gas – at high temperatures. Goretex Remedia bags will destroy the dioxins and the gas will heat water to create steam and produce electricity. The ash by-product left behind will be used as fertiliser if it complies with the Waste Incineration Directive, otherwise it will go for use in aggregates.
Finally, PREL's plant will use plasma vitrification technology to separate and recover non-organic material, as well as recover recyclables from the ash by-product of gasification. The plasma – electrically conducted gas – extracts material such as glass and metals by breaking it down into molecules and then recombining it. Plastics will not be treated this way but will be reprocessed into pellets on-site.
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