PowerHouse Energy Group has announced that it has made “significant progress” towards first commercial operation of its plant using the proprietary DMG technology.
Located on the Protos Energy Park in Cheshire, the DMG plant will use waste plastic, tires and other material waste streams to produce a syngas product. This can be used as a precursor for the production of road fuel-quality hydrogen, and also for electricity generation.
Peel L&P Environmental has completed its first review of the engineering work completed so far at the site and moved to commit funding for the next stage of DMG development.
The design of the DMG plant would support processing of 35 tonnes of waste plastics per day, with a target of delivering 3.8MWe. Of that, 3.4MWe would be made available, together with up to two tonnes of hydrogen per day.
While the Protos site is said to have ‘full outline planning consent’, the statement says that planning permission is currently under review.
Contracts with management, civil and plant engineering partners are expected to be in place in early 2020. This is part of the collaboration agreement signed in August 2019 between Peel and Waste2Tricity to develop a minimum of 11 DMG ‘Plastic Parks’ in the UK.
It is hoped that each site will operate at a net negative CO2 output, while helping to ensure that no plastic waste from these sites is sent to landfill.
David Ryan, CEO of PowerHouse Energy, commented: “This agreement represents the completion of the preliminary engineering stage and I am most encouraged that the PHE team have achieved a major uplift in the performance of the DMG process, including almost doubling the hydrogen output to 2 tonnes, significantly enhancing our partners commercial drivers.
“The commitment demonstrates significant commercial confidence from Peel L&P Environmental to the immediate and long-term deployment of the process in the UK.”
The Powerhouse technology is described as ‘one of the world’s first proven, modular, hydrogen from waste processes’.
Working in a small operational footprint, it is further reported that the process produces low levels of safe reduces, making it suitable for deployment at enterprise and community levels.