New research facility to be at heart of ‘green economy’

Dr Cable was speaking to the Yorkshire Post at the official opening of the Biorenewables Development Centre yesterday, which he attended as part of a visit to Yorkshire that included a stop-off at engineering firm Group Rhodes’ head office in Wakefield and sports car manufacturer Ginetta in Garforth, near Leeds.

Group Rhodes, which employs 245 people and whose turnover is on target to be between £25m and £30m this year, announced it had won three export orders worth £24.5m.

The Biorenewables Development Centre, based at York Science Park Bio Centre, benefited from funding worth £2.5m from the Department for Business Innovation and Skills and investment from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The centre aims to work with more than 130 small and medium-sized businesses, provide around £7m of added value to the local economy and to help create more than 100 jobs in the region by 2015.

The facility, which builds on research already undertaken at the university’s Centre for Novel Agricultural Products and Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence, currently employs 10 people directly but is applying for more funding to double its headcount.

Dr Cable, for whom York is his hometown, said: “Clearly, this is a university research facility but it has enormous economic potential and if Britain is to successfully find a way of earning a living, it’s going to come in the knowledge economy and this is a very good example of that, it’s going to come from innovative manufacturing technologies and bioscience is very much a part of that.

“One of the aspects of the future economy that we are very keen to emphasise is the so-called green economy.

“Now mostly you hear about this in the more glamourous issues like wind farms or electric cars but actually the real movement is happening on the biological side and you’re now getting quite a lot of power generated through bioplants plus the kind of activities that are being explored here.

“So what you have developing at York University is something at the heart of the future green economy. Britain is a world leader in some of these techniques and I’m delighted to see this happening.”

The centre provides companies and researchers with a way to test, develop and scale up biorefining processes – where biomass is refined to create products such as biofuels, power, food and chemicals for example. The facility will use plants, biowaste and microbes to create renewable raw materials, while a unique element of the centre is that it can also use molecular fast track breeding technology, which improves plants and microbes for the production of high value chemicals.

“A lot of it will be focused around getting high value chemicals out of plants, so plants as well providing us with food, provide us with things like pharmaceuticals, personal care product chemicals, polymers that can be used in industry and things like this”, said Prof Simon McQueen-Mason, who is on the board at the centre.

With regard to the centre’s work with biowaste, he cited orange peel as an example. “If you look at any juice factory anywhere in the world, even in London, they produce hundreds of thousands of tonnes of peel a year.

“Things like orange peel are full of all sorts of valuable chemicals like limonene which are used as flavours. There are high value polymers like various derivatives of pectin, used for the food industry, and there are waxes you can use for coatings, so what you can do is look at these high volume waste products, look at the classes of chemicals you can produce in there and then using the array of process technology we’ve got, then look at developing integrated processes to get the valuable components out of plants.”

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