PowerHouse Energy Group Plc (LON:PHE) has updated investors on the successful demonstration plant at University of Chester’s Thornton Science Park where it has been processing waste to create a synthetic gas fuel.
The company’s DMG (or Distributed Modular Gasification) system was commissioned in the summer of 2017 and it has been operating safely and efficiently for more than six months.
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It highlighted that independent analysis of the gas, which is produced from ‘tyre crumb’, has determined that syngas can be adequately purified to provide a 99.999% pure stream of road-fuel-quality hydrogen. At the same time excess syngas has been used for generating electricity.
Operations in 2018, to date, have focussed the plant on plastic which would be the source of commercial feedstock.
“The results of the plastics testing have been very encouraging and allow us to feed valuable data into our rapidly advancing commercial process design,” said David Ryan, PowerHouse technical director.
“We continue to use the data derived from our process demonstration unit in our ongoing dialogue with prospective manufacturers and to aid and accelerate our planning and permitting processes.”
The penultimate tests aim to successfully use the system for the production of electricity - data derived from the testing is contributing substantially to front-end-design engineering for the group’s first commercial project at Ellesmere Port.
In the next stage, the system will be connected to the micro-grid at Thornton Science Park, where work to make the connection is presently underway.