Tees Valley Environmental Technology
Issued: 29 May 2007
A regular digest of renewable energy,
recycling and waste management related events and projects in the Tees Valley
Published by Renew Tees Valley Issue 1 May 2007
Biomass & Biofuels‘North East Leading the Way on Green Issues’
Green fuel producer, Ensus, has commenced work on the UK’s first bioethanol plant at Wilton in the Tees Valley. Environment Secretary, David Miliband, who attended a ceremony at Wilton to mark the event, took the opportunity to praise the North East for helping the UK lead the way in tackling climate change.
The £250m plant will produce 400m litres of bioethanol a year, which will account for about a third of the UK’s demand by 2010. It will create 800 construction and 100 production jobs. Alwyn Hughes, who heads Ensus, said “I know of nowhere better in the world to invest in this kind of plant than Teesside and no better place for the quality of people for this industry”.
With Europe’s largest biodiesel plant operational at Billingham and other bioethanol projects in the pipeline, the Tees Valley is now firmly established as the UK’s premier biofuels centre.
Contact: droddy@renewteesvalley.co.uk
Biorefineries Study
In a joint project with the North East Process Industry Cluster (NEPIC), RTV is exploring the potential of a key ‘next generation’ technology – biorefining. Like petrochemical refineries, bioefineries will produce both high-volume fuel and high value chemicals and products.
Funding for the £70,000 project comes from One NorthEast (£50,000), with NEPIC and the Tees Valley Joint Strategy Unit contributing £20,000. The project will look at feedstocks, technology and end products, with the ultimate aim of identifying viable commercial models.
Wood Recycling Plant
UK Wood Recycling has officially opened its £4m wood recycling plant, the UK’s largest, on the Wilton site close to the UK’s largest purpose-built wood burning power station – SembCorp’s pioneering Wilton 10. The recycling facility has the capacity to process up to 200,000 tonnes of wood a year, including 80,000 tonnes for Wilton 10.
Recycling and Waste Management
Have You Got the Bottle?
Renew Tees Valley has joined forces with Recycling Action Yorkshire (RAY) and Envirolink Northwest in a major new campaign to encourage licensed outlets in more than 30 cities and towns across the north of England to consign their waste glass to recycling businesses, rather than to landfill. More than 17,000 pubs, clubs etc have been targeted in the campaign, which marks the first collaboration by three organisations with the common aim of supporting the growth of the environmental industries in their respective regions.
chayward@renewteesvalley.co.uk
Major Glass Re-processing Plant for the Tees Valley
A new Tees Valley company, Granulated Glass Products Limited, is on schedule to commission a £5m glass plant with the capacity to purify and re-process up to 200,000 tonnes per annum of waste glass into high added value products by the end of the year. The plant, which will be largest of its kind in Europe, is expected to create more than 40 jobs in its first year.
The brainchild of an entrepreneur who started in businesses selling decorative glass products from a craft workshop, Granulated Glass is adopting a process that reduces the glass waste to smooth granules that provide a cost-effective solution for a range of applications. Provisional sales agreements have already been secured for end users in the shot blasting and water purification sectors. Through RTV, which has supported the project from the outset, the company has accessed support from One NorthEast, WRAP and Recycling Action Yorkshire.
pajackson@renewteesvalley.co.uk
Re-using Building Materials
A full house of more than 80 representatives from local authorities and the construction, demolition and property development sectors attended a workshop organised by RTV to launch a project to establish a building material reuse centre (BMRC) in the Tees Valley. A potential site for the centre has already been identified.
While thousands of tonnes of building materials are scrapped every year in the Tees Valley, research commissioned by RTV from WasteWISE Consultants confirmed there is a potential market for everything from plain and decorative stonework to mellow old bricks and a whole range of wood and metal fixtures and fittings.
chayward@renewteesvalley.co.uk
Carpet Recovery
An RTV feasibility study on the potential to create new business and training opportunities by recovering used carpets has attracted keen interest from the social enterprise network, training organisations and local plastic companies. Based on a scheme established in Glasgow to recover used carpets from homes, businesses and public buildings for cleaning, trimming and re-sale, the RTV model adds a new dimension by bringing in local plastics processing companies to recover polypropylene from carpets that are beyond re-use.
chayward@renewteesvalley.co.uk
Untapped waste streams
The building material and carpet studies were the first in an on-going initiative through which RTV plans to look at the business opportunities arising from the recovery of different elements of the Tees Valley waste stream. It would like to hear from businesses or individuals who have identified potential in specific materials so it can help determine if they are worth pursuing.
chayward@renewteesvalley.co.uk
Revolutionising Household Waste Management
An innovative, large-scale version of the steam autoclave process used to sterilise hospital and laboratory equipment will be at the hub of the Tees Valley’s first dedicated ecopark – full details of which will be announced shortly. Graphite Resources, the Newcastle on Tyne-based waste management specialist which conceived and developed the Proteus process, has worked closely with RTV to develop the project in the Tees Valley.
Proteus processes binbag and other difficult to manage co-mingled waste at 160 degrees Celsius, reducing volumes by up to 80%, recovering re-usable materials and reducing the remainder to a cellosic end product with many applications. The process is safe, clean and dramatically reduces volumes of landfill and carbon emissions.
chayward@renewteesvalley.co.uk
Promoting the Tees Valley at CIWM 2007
The facilities, infrastructure and business support services that have made the Tees Valley the fastest developing centre in the UK for the recycling and renewable energy industries will be featured for the first time at CIWM 2007, the UK’s premier recycling and waste management exhibition. The exhibition runs from 12-14 June at Paignton Devon – if you are visiting, come and see us on Stand T28
chayward@renewteesvalley.co.uk
Energy
Power From Waste Heat
In a project initiated with RTV’s power generation specialist, Peter Loftus, DRD Consultants is close to the successful completion of the first practical assessment of the potential savings that can be achieved by converting waste heat generated by the process industries into electricity.
Process engineers from DRD have been working with a major local process company, assessing how the application of state-of-the-art heat exchange technology and a closed loop Organic Rankine Cycle (which has been around for about 150 years) can prevent hot water or steam created by plants ending up cooling in effluent pits. The aim of the initial project is to create a simple assessment tool and a basket of relevant technologies that can be applied to plants all over the world.
Hydrogen from Wind
Following on from its initial study in 2005, Wind Hydrogen Limited is progressing its plans to apply electrolysis to convert surplus wind electricity generated at night into hydrogen for storage in the unique underground facility created more than 60 years ago in the Tees Valley by solution mining of salt. A 30km urban pipeline network, which takes in the Tees Valley’s three major chemical engineering complexes, is in place to handle distribution.
The company – which recently announced it had raised AU$2.4m through a fully underwritten rights issue that paved the way for an initial public offering – is working with a local partner to demonstrate through more detailed feasibility studies that markets for hydrogen can provide long term offtake agreements as an alternative to Power Purchase Agreements
ploftus@renewteesvalley.co.uk]
Pyrolysis – The Total Solution for Discarded Tyres
A company which aims to transform discarded tyres from a major environmental hazard into a valuable commodity has opted for a site in the Tees Valley as the first in a planned European network of processing plants.
PYReco has exclusive European rights on an American pyrolysis process that returns discarded tyres to their valuable basic components (carbon black, high tensile steel, light oil and heavy oil) and generates heat either for use in a CHP system or for harnessing to generate electricity. The planned Tees Valley plant, which will be the first of two large and eight smaller plants in a European network, will handle up to 200 tonnes of tyres a day.
GENERATOR CONTROL UNITS FOR CHP MARKET
Darlington-based Heinzmann UK Limited is adding a range of low cost, simple to operate generator control units for the CHP and distributed energy market to its well-established range of analogue control units. The first unit in the company's new GEN-ECO range, which was developed with assistance from RTV, will provide voltage matching with digital display and simple, on-board programming and will be further enhanced by the addition of power factor control and master voltage control later this year. GEN-ECO units will be modular to allow easy retrofitting to existing installations.
Heinzmann UK is a wholly owned subsidiary of Heinzmann GmbH KG, the German based company which is one of the world's leading manufacturers of speed governors, fuel control systems and generator management electronics for industrial engine and turbine applications. The UK subsidiary was formed in 1984 to develop control electronics for Heinzmann electro-mechanical speed governors and generator management controls for emergency standby baseload and CHP applications. The GEN-ECO range builds on this experience and expertise.
Macmillan College Goes Green
RTV's commerce manager, Paul Jackson, is working with staff and pupils at Middlesbrough's Macmillan College on a project to identify and source the most appropriate and cost-efficient renewable energy technology.
pajackson@renewteesvalley.co.uk
Councillors Give the Go Ahead for Coatham Links Development
The decision by Redcar & Cleveland’s planning committee to go ahead with the £88m Coatham Links housing and leisure complex in Redcar means that the Tees Valley will have two prestigious distributed energy systems under development within its boundaries. Middlesbrough’s flagship Middlehaven development will actually provide a test facility for renewable technologies and will install a 1.2 MW fuel cell as one of its energy sources.
Coatham Links - which has RTV’s Peter Loftus as its energy consultant – has put out a tender for a CHP service provider to operate a core gas-fired scheme for the development over the next 25 years. The tender allows for alternative power sources to be adopted if and when they are considered suitable during that period.
Green Energy at Riverside Stadium
Middlesbrough Football Club's project to install a wind turbine with up to 3MW generating capacity at Riverside Stadium remains on schedule for completion by early 2009. The Club has obtained planning consent to erect a wind measuring mast, which will provide the data necessary to select the optimum turbine for the site.
RTV has been heavily involved in the project from the outset and sits on the Club's Turbine Implementation Group. It will play a key role in discussions with manufacturers and in the extensive public consultation exercise, which is scheduled to commence shortly as part of the process of obtaining planning consents. More than 80% of respondents to a survey on the Club's website were very much in favour of the scheme.
pajackson@renewteesvalley.co.uk
New Carbon Trading Market Born in the Tees Valley
A carbon trading exchange that will allow firms which are not subject to caps on carbon emissions to benefit from offsetting all or some of theirs has been launched by a Tees Valley company. Cred Limited, which opted for a base in the Tees Valley because of the rapidly growing renewables sector, believes CredEx marks the birth of a new market and a wealth of opportunity for smaller firms. A key feature is the use of Smart metering to record energy data and thus enable firms to measure their reduction in order to offset their emissions.
CredEx is one of a range of services offered by Cred Limited, which works with clients to minimise their carbon footprints through monitoring of energy use, training and awareness and identification of low-carbon technologies.
All-Energy Exhibition and Conference
Dr Dermot Roddy, chief executive of RTV, presented a paper on a flagship Tees Valley project - a £1bn, 800MW Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle power station, with carbon capture and storage - at the All-Energy Exhibition and Conference, Aberdeen on 22-24 May.
A joint venture involving Centrica and clean coal specialist, Progressive Energy, the project is currently entering a two-year design and planning stage, with construction scheduled to begin early in 2009. A world first for the Tees Valley, it features plans to pipe captured carbon dioxide offshore for enhanced oil recovery before storing it underground. The facility to use the plant to generate 40 tonnes per hour of hydrogen when electricity prices are low provides a major boost for the Tees Valley’s hydrogen economy.