Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 25th April 2024 Issue no. 1111

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Green vegetables gas up

In January 2015, Weltec Biopower started building an anaerobic digestion plant in Loughgall, Northern Ireland. The customer and operator of the 500KW plant is vegetable producer Gilfresh Produce, which will use the plant to process its waste vegetables and other products into energy for both its own use and for feeding into the national grid.

Thanks to Northern Ireland's mild Gulf Stream climate, the root vegetables, salad crops, numerous cabbage varieties and trend products such as pak choi, planted by this family enterprise, thrive on an agricultural area of 1,000 ha. and once ready for harvesting are collected and processed into food.

The company, which was established more than 50 years ago and has almost 130 employees, used to deliver the vegetable waste that accumulates in the sorting, washing and packaging processes to farmers as cattle feed but all this is about to change. From July 2015, the waste and the vegetable washing water will be loaded into the bioreactor.

In addition to vegetable waste; cattle manure, chicken litter and whole crop grass and maize silage will be used.

In view of the different properties of the substances to be used, the investors were impressed by the Weltec solution for uninterrupted entry of the input material: The robust MultiMix system guarantees continuous utilisation and homogenisation of the substrates and stable plant operation.
To maintain an optimum stock level, an underground pre-storage tank is located before the two, 2,625m3 stainless-steel digesters; a 6,000m3 tank is planned for gas-tight digestate storage.

In combination with an 80m3 solid matter dosing feeder, the Weltec system ensures optimum shredding and intensive mixing of the vegetable waste and long-fibre silage. The efficient pre-processing of the substances ensures, not only biological decomposition and efficient gas yield, but also low energy consumption of the plant.

In line with the company's goal to constantly improve its ecological footprint, the decision-makers at Gilfresh decided to supply its own energy: About 40% of the power generated by the 500KW combined heat & power plant can be utilised in the company's own production process. In the near future, the efficiency will increase even more due to the upcoming expansion of the cold storage facility. The excess power will be fed into the national grid, and the process heat will be used for heating the company's buildings and for the production processes.

"The biogas plant will enable us to pursue our growth course on the one hand and our ecological goals on the other hand," explains Thomas Gilpin, founder of Gilfresh. "Weltec has designed the plant precisely for our specific production conditions.
"What ultimately convinced us was the fact that Weltec was able to offer this flexible design with high-quality technologies."

Kevin Monson, sales manager of Weltec Biopower UK, in Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, says: "Such projects are necessary to enable the UK to provide 15% of its energy demand from renewable energy sources by 2020. Furthermore, carbon emissions are to be reduced by about three quarters by then, compared to 1990. The UK has understood that besides wind and solar energy, another renewable source needs to be established in order to ensure reliable supply, and has subsidised bioenergy by means of measures such as attractive feed-in tariffs for regional power.

"If other entrepreneurs follow the example of Gilfresh Produce, the United Kingdom will be able to reach the defined climate goals.

"For Weltec, "This is the third plant in Northern Ireland and thus the eleventh in the UK."

T: +49 (0) 4441-999 78-220
W: www.weltec-biopower.de

9th April 2015