The BEIS expenditure comes in wake of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Ten point plan for a green industrial revolution, which was announced in November 2020.
Funding support announced yesterday (24 May) is for projects primarily involving waste wood and biowaste and carbon capture. The announcement is HERE.
It includes support for work at:
- The Ince biomass plant
- Severn Trent Power and biowaste
- Severn Wyre Energy Agency
The Ince biomass plant will receive a £250,000 project grant from BEIS
Ince
Bioenergy Infrastructure Group (BIG) and Peel NRE, part of Peel L&P, have secured £250,000 from the BEIS Net Zero Innovation Portfolio for the Ince Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage project known as ‘InBECCS’.
The Phase 1 project aims to develop and design a 20 tonnes per day CO2 capture demonstration plant at the heart of the North West industrial cluster, “underpinned by C-Capture technology and a 28.5MWe biomass gasification unit”. Future phasing is to deliver the first operational BECCS plant in the North West of England, the first instance of integrated BECCS-gasification in the UK, the next “innovative stride in C-Capture’s technology” and ultimately accelerate the adoption of BECCS-based carbon negative power.
The project is being delivered via a collaboration between Peel NRE and Bioenergy Infrastructure Group at their biomass facility located at Protos, Peel L&P’s energy and resource hub in Cheshire.
Mersey Biochar
This funding allocation is to support “Carbon Negative Community Energy” and is led by Severn Wye Energy Agency alongside Pure Leapfrog and industrial partner PyroCore.
Pyrolysis technology will be developed to incorporate enhanced carbon capture capacity, and to produce a range of marketable outputs, including biochar for carbon sequestration, carbon products for construction, and heat for a local district heating network. The project team say this enables improved management of local woodland and forestry by putting local waste wood to use, ultimately growing the local supply chain and improving the natural environment.
‘Bio-waste to Biochar’
This project involves the use of hydrothermal carbonisation and post-carbonisation.
It is led by the University of Nottingham alongside its industrial partners CPL Industries and Severn Trent Green Power. The team say that the expansion of anaerobic digestion, including food waste, indicates there is potential to produce ca. 0.5 Mt p.a. of biochar from biowastes by 2030. “Since hydrothermal carbonisation (HTC) operates at 200oC, subsequent carbonisation of the resultant biocoal is required to produce stable biochar containing low proportions of potentially degradable carbon.”
Initial analysis has indicated that carbon sequestration costs are below (£100 t/CO2 avoided). The team say: “The aim is to establish the feasibility of this approach and optimise process design and operation. A digestate residue supplied by Severn Trent Green Power will be treated by HTC in the pilot plant at CPL. Up to 10 tonnes of the resultant HTC biocoal will then be treated in a pilot-plant to establish the quality of the biochar for sequestration that can be obtained by post-carbonisation, enabling design options to be considered for producing over 600 tonnes of biochar p.a. (2000 tonnes CO2 equivalent) in the next development phase to achieve deployment by 2030.”
Funding advice
More information about the funds available and the type of projects the government is supporting can be found at the BEIS web page about The CCUS Innovation 2.0 competition. This is part of the £1 billion Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP).
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