Three companies have been awarded a share of £25 million in funding from the Department for Transport to help develop and commercialise the technologies required to decarbonise the transport sector.

All three projects will use residual waste products to create biofuels for cars and heavy goods vehicles (HGVs).

A consortium led by waste to energy and fuels company Advanced Plasma Power (APP) has been awarded £11 million from the government fund to develop and build a plant that will turn waste into biomethane.

The plant, which APP says is the first of its kind in the world, will be built in Swindon and will take residual waste from local homes and businesses and convert it into compressed biomethane using APP’s Gasplasma® technology. The resulting biomethane will be used to fuel HGVs.

Alongside APP, the consortium partners are gas network National Grid, clean energy firm Progressive Energy and CNG Services, which provides gas for use in vehicles. The remaining £9 million needed to fund the £20 million construction will be provided by the partners.

According to APP, biomethane can be used interchangeably with natural gas in HGVs and ‘has the potential to cut transport carbon emissions by up to 96 per cent’.

Construction on the plant, which will create 10 permanent jobs, will begin next year and is due to be completed in the middle of 2017, with operation beginning in late 2017. Providers for feedstock have already been found locally and local haulage company Howard Tenens and consortium partner CNG Services will use the gas produced. APP says that the plant will be able to supply enough fuel to run 75 vehicles on a full-time basis.

Celtic Renewables, an Edinburgh-based biofuel producer, has also been given £11 million to help it build a plant that will create biofuel from the residues created by the whisky industry.

The facility will use acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation to turn draff, the sugar-rich kernals of barley that are used in the whisky fermentation process, and pot ale, the liquid left over after distillation, into biofuel.

According to Celtic Renewables, the plant will be operational by December 2018 and will be able to produce ‘at least one million litres of biofuel’ suitable for cars every year.

The final project to benefit from the funding is Nova Pangaea Technologies, which will receive £3 million to demonstrate its ‘low-cost process’ of creating biofuels from forestry waste.

Nova Pangaea says that with development, the process will ‘provide a sustainable source for liquid transportation fuels’, using a variety of biomass feedstocks.

Biofuel technology presents a ‘triple win’ for transport sector

Speaking after the announcement of the funding, Transport Secretary Andrew Jones said: “Biofuels have an important role to play in keeping Britain moving forward in a sustainable and environmentally-friendly way. This £25 million is not only a vital investment in technology that will help secure a greener future but will also support the creation of thousands of jobs.

“Advanced biofuels have the potential to save at least 60 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions from the equivalent fossil fuel. The three successful bids show how the government is investing in transport and making better, clean journeys.”

Rolf Stein, CEO of APP, said: “The grant… highlights the important role our technology can play in producing clean biofuels from waste on a local basis, so as to help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from both the waste management as well as transport sectors without the requirement to give over large swathes of land to growing energy crops. From an economic, environmental and social perspective it presents a real triple win.

“Our state-of-the-art process can unlock the enormous value of residual waste as a resource and provides a cost-effective means of converting such waste to fuels such as biomethane. Our expectation is that this plant will lead the way to a new generation of ultimate recycling facilities both in the UK and around the world.”

Professor Martin Tangney, founder of Celtic Renewables, said: “Our aim is to reintroduce [the ABE] process but in a modern context which allows us to use the leftovers from the whisky industry to create a fuel source that contributes to the low-carbon future we all want.

“We are committed to developing a new industry right here in the UK that will be worth more than £100 million-a-year, and it starts here. We have already attracted investment and partners in the private sector, and this funding announced today will allow us to scale-up to industrial production.

“Our next step is to open a demonstration facility and we are targeting a location in or near Grangemouth which is an area that’s strategically right for us.”

Biomethane fuelling vehicles in the UK

Vehicles running on biomethane are becoming more common in the UK, though, to date, most of the biomethane has been derived from anaerobic digestion.

Retailer John Lewis has a fleet of 40 dual-fuel HGVs that are able to run on biomethane where it is available, while Reading, Sunderland and Bristol all have bus routes running on the fuel.

Reading Buses uses 34 vehicles that run on biomethane compressed natural gas recovered from cow manure. In May, its ‘Bus Hound’ set a new land-speed record for an unmodified service bus when it recorded an official speed of 76.785mph at Millbrook Proving Ground.

The Bristol Bio-Bus, which appropriately runs the ‘number 2’ service in the city’s bus system, is powered by biomethane recovered by the anaerobic digestion of locally-sourced food waste and human excrement. The bus can travel 300 kilometres on a full tank of gas.

Learn more about Advanced Plasma Power, Celtic Renewables and Nova Pangaea or read our in-depth feature on the Bristol Bio-Bus in Resource 81.