Falcon Waste Development Land Company, part of the Larkfleet Group, and React Energy have submitted a planning application to build an energy recovery facility in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, UK.
The two companies are partners in Clay Cross Biomass Limited. The company has been established specifically to develop the Clay Cross Energy Recovery Facility, which will produce heat and electrical power by gasification of waste wood from construction and demolition, commercial and industrial sources.
When running at full capacity the plant will be able to generate around 12MW of electrical power. Some of this will be required for operating the facility but about 10MW will be exported to the electric grid network.
In addition to electricity, the plant will produce up to 10MW of thermal energy in the form of hot water or steam. This could be made available to local businesses, industry, homes and nearby future developments.
The other usable output of the gasification facility will be an ash/char material, which can be used as aggregate in low-grade concrete production or as a capping for landfill or for land reclamation. Approximately 4,000 metric tons of this material could be produced each year — about 5 percent of the total weight of waste timber being put into the process.
Gasification offers a number of advantages over direct combustion of the fuel because it translates approximately 80 percent of the chemical energy present in the biomass feedstock into chemical energy during the gas phase without the production of harmful by-products, the company says.
In other waste-to-energy news, Covanta’s Delaware Valley energy-from-waste facility in Chester, Pennsylvania, has saved 1.3 million gallons a day from local water supplies by installing General Electric’s RePAK water reuse technology in the power plant’s cooling tower, GE announced this week.