Following the decision, BioGen Power's chief executive, Christian Reeve, said: “This is a highly suitable industrial location with good electricity connection, direct links to the highway, high potential for heat recovery and close proximity to waste customers. As such, there were no objections from statutory consultees or the general public.”
And, speaking to letsrecycle.com yesterday (April 6), Mr Reeve revealed that the company was now moving towards finalising arrangements for both the waste to be processed in the facility and the electricity and heat it is expected to produce.
He explained that “the plant will initially be constructed as a merchant plant”, but that BioGen would be looking to hold discussions with both local councils and businesses during the plant's construction to secure waste inputs.
Once built, the plant is expected to generate 12 megawatts of renewable electricity, which will be exported to the local grid, and Mr Reeve revealed that “we're in negotiations with industrial neighbours about the heat”.
Work on the plant is now set to begin in 2010, with the aim of having the facility up-and-running by 2012.
Collaboration
The Newport facility is the second of at least 12 facilities that BioGen plans to build as part of its collaboration with Energos.
It has already received planning permission for an 80,000 tonne-a-year capacity gasification plant at Irvine in Ayrshire, and Mr Reeve explained that “we're hoping to have started work on that by early 2010”.
BioGen has said that it has eight of the 12 locations under its control, but Mr Reeve would not reveal the locations of those, other than Newport and Irvine.
The company has said that getting the facilities up-and-running will require a capital investment of £700 million, and, if successful, the plans would give it the capacity to treat 1.5 million tonnes of residual waste a year and generate around 100 megawatts of electricity.
“We have plans to develop 12 gasification-from-waste plants in the UK and conducted a worldwide search to identify Energos as the best technology provider,” Mr Reeve explained.
“Critically, this means we can offer a commercially proven, financially viable process that sets new standards of emissions performance and is a best practice alternative to incineration and landfill,” he added.
Energos
The Newport plant would represent Energos' sixth gasification project in the UK – though only its Isle of Wight facility (see letsrecycle.com story) is currently up-and-running.
Last year, that plant was the first gasification site to receive preliminary accreditation under the government's system of green energy subsidies, the Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs) (see letsrecycle.com story).
And, Energos has said that it is confident that its technology will now qualify, as advanced gasification, for an increased subsidy under changes to the ROCs system that came into force last week (see letsrecycle.com story).
Subscribe for free