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Biogas power plant will use waste food
WORK has started on a £10m waste-to-electricity plant on the outskirts of Driffield, which will create up to 30 new jobs.
GWE Biogas will eventually process up to 50,000 tonnes of food waste each year and produce sufficient biogas to provide electricity to more than 2,000 homes.
The firm has been established by businessmen and farmers Tom Megginson and Mathew Girking and is one of a number of ways the UK is seeking to be less reliant on foreign imports. The plant will be one of the country's first anaerobic digestion plants and technical consultant Peter Rossington insisted yesterday that it would be odourless as all the processing will be done indoors, with a large fan sucking in air and preventing smells from escaping.
Mr Rossington, who lives in Driffield, said the food waste could come from food manufacturers or waste companies and may come some distance, adding: "Most responsible retailers want to stop putting food into landfill because of the negative environmental consequences."
Similar plants are widespread on the Continent, particularly in Germany, but the UK had been slow to take them up – in part, because landfill was a cheap option until taxes came in.
Mr Rossington said: "I can't say we are going to be cheap, but we will be cost competitive. We will be cheaper than landfill."
He added: "Britain has been really slow in doing this but we are going to pioneer the way here.
"It is critical if the Government is going to meet its renewable energy targets and its diversion from landfill targets.
"You can divert food from landfill by going down the composting route, but you don't get the energy benefit."
The plant is being built in two phases; the first phase involves building a digestor – basically a large tank – to take the first 25,000 tonnes of waste.
Shredders and pressers remove packaging before it is fed into the tank where it is mixed with natural bacteria, which use it as a food source, producing carbon dioxide and methane and leaving water and a material rich in phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium which can be used as an alternative to chemical fertilisers. The gas is dried and any sulphur removed before being fed to an engine connected to a generator.
The facility is being built on a two-hectare site on the western boundary of the Ministry of Defence training area at Eastburn Farm. Most of the civil engineering works are complete or well underway.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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