A gasification pioneer aims to seal the UK’s low-carbon future after winning a UK Government grant worth nearly £300,000 to develop waste-to-hydrogen.
Compact Syngas Solutions (CSS), based in Deeside, has secured £299,886 from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) with the help of production technology, innovation funding specialist Catax.
The funding comes from the Low Carbon Hydrogen Supply 2 Programme, which is part of the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio.
CSS and its three project partners will now forge ahead with a bid to make clean, green, low-emission hydrogen fuel a reality for the vehicles on our roads using waste that would normally be sent to landfill.
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If successful, their technological leap will form a major part of the UK Government’s bid to reach net zero by 2050, as the only exhaust emissions from hydrogen-fuelled vehicles are warm air and water. CSS are also in the process of developing carbon capture technology for the gasification process to reduce emissions even further.
The project aims to demonstrate that low carbon hydrogen can be produced economically and efficiently. The hydrogen produced by the modular unit being developed could also be used by power plants in areas detached from mainstream energy grids.
CSS is being supported on the project by Q-Technologies, Pure Energy Centre (PEC), and ASH Group.
The solution they have devised will create hydrogen using what’s known as Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF) — in other words, biomass waste diverted from landfill by waste management companies with the aim of utilising Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) in the future.
If this initial phase is successful, it will open up the possibility of an additional £6m of BEIS funding to allow the team to build a full-scale, state-of-the-art solution of the kind that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.
This facility would be capable of producing 35kg of hydrogen per hour — enough to fill around 20 large vehicles per day.