More than £45 million has been invested in “the first waste-to-ethanol-fuel plant in the UK”, which will make an alternative to fossil fuels. Yorkshire based waste business the Maltings Organic Treatment company was working with process inventors Gensyst, when they realised that the technology could be converted to take food and organic waste.

This led to a joint venture between MOT and AqueGen (which includes Gensyst).

The plant, to be built in Yorkshire, is expected to be operational by 2011 and will convert 400,000 dry tonnes of biomass into 100 million litres of biofuel ethanol. It will use gravity pressure vessel technology to process organic waste from commercial, industrial and domestic sources. The technology uses natural gravity and heat to convert waste into a sugar solution which is fermented and turned into ethanol and butemol. After further refining, the product can be used as a fuel.

MOT’s parent company Mytum & Selby director Steve Carrie explained: “We were looking at composting and researching anaerobic digestion when we came across a company in the US, Gensyst, that had invented the ethanol system. But it was being used to destroy waste, rather than produce fuel.

“Gensyst had found that by tweaking the technology they could produce a sugar solution and in the past months this system has been tweaked again to enable it to take waste food and liquid as a feedstock.”

Feedstock for the plant will come from facilities owned by Mytum and Selby, which will be on the same site. By October 2009 an in-vessel composting plant processing 25,000 tonnes will be up and running, with capacity rising to 75,000 tonnes by the end of 2010. This will be in time with the launch of the ethanol plant in 2011.

Carrie said: “They will bolt on the technology and then supply waste feedstock to them straight away.”