The project, which has already received planning permission from North Lincolnshire council, is expected to begin treating 80,000 tonnes-a-year of both locally-arising residual waste, including residual household waste, and other biomass materials in early 2012.
Construction on the site is expected to begin in early 2010 and Nick Dawber, managing director of Energos, said: “Energos offers a proven and world class, low-emission gasification technology that will make a key contribution to the government's landfill diversion targets.”
“We believe that our strategy of providing community sized energy from waste solutions that complement local recycling initiatives is the way forward. This is proven at our existing operations in Norway and Germany, which have a proven track record of extremely low emissions,” he added.
Singleton Birch intends to use the majority of the renewable electricity and heat at the Melton Rose quarry and processing facility, with the remainder of the 5.75 MW of energy produced on the site set to be available for local use through the National Grid.
Martin Haworth, technical director at Singleton Birch, said: “We are delighted to get the go ahead for this pioneering scheme which tackles two of the key environmental challenges of waste disposal and carbon reduction.”
Plans
Energos is also set to start construction later this year on its fifth UK project, an 80,000 tonne-a-year capacity facility in Irvine, Scotland and is already in the process of building another Norwegian plant in Sarpsborg.
The company, which already has one facility operational on the Isle of Wight, also has further UK developments planned in Merseyside (see letsrecycle.com story) and Derbyshire (see letsrecycle.com story).
The announcement of the development of the North Lincolnshire gasification plant is the latest in a number of project announcements from companies looking to use the thermal treatment technology, including London-based start-up energy firm Waste2Tricity (see letsrecycle.com story) and Monmouth-based Cyclamax outlining plans for a “flagship” plant in the UK (see letsrecycle.com story).
In light of the government's proposed changes to the Renewables Obligations Certificate (ROC) system of subsidies, which aims to promote less developed forms of renewable energy, advanced gasification facilities look set to receive double ROCs compared to other more established green energy options from April 1.
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