Evero's Ince Biopower is showcasing the potential of waste wood as a feedstock.

Ince Biopower is an energy recovery facility in the Protos Energy Park, recovering energy from waste wood.

As much as 4.5 million tons of wood waste are generated a year in the UK. This ranges from industrial wood waste, such as MDF panels that fail quality control, through to the wood collected at household waste recycling centres.

Of that volume, 1.5 million can be recycled into products like animal bedding, but for the remainder there is currently no other use apart from energy recovery. If we didn’t use it for energy recovery, it would either be landfilled (slowly releasing carbon to the atmosphere) or exported to be recovered abroad, resulting in more CO2 emissions in the transportation process.

All the waste wood used at Ince Biopower and Evero’s other sites is locally sourced within the UK. We don’t need to import our feedstock or chop down trees to power our plants.

Ince Biopower can divert up to 170,000 tons of waste from landfill and generates enough low carbon electricity to power 42,000 homes. The electricity is low carbon as the carbon that is in the wood was once in the atmosphere. This means that by gasifying the wood and combusting the resultant syngas for electricity generation, the carbon impact is balanced.

What of the future? At Evero, we are reimagining the use of waste wood. What if we used the syngas created by gasifying the wood for something else? Rich in hydrogen, it could be used to make bio-methanol or sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

Or what about the CO2 created through combusting the syngas? If we captured it and pumped it into geological storage through the Hynet cluster, we would create negative emissions. The carbon that was once in the atmosphere and captured in the wood would then be stored in the ground. Or, that carbon could be combined with green hydrogen to make e-methanol.

There is great potential in waste wood as a feedstock and at Ince Biopower as an asset that processes it. At Evero, we are reimagining the future of waste. Please stay in touch on LinkedIn or visit our website to find out more.