A planned £150m plant will produce renewable & recycled carbon DME a clean, sustainable fuel from non-recyclable waste.
The project covers 14 acres at Teesworks inland development Dorman Point, near Middlesborough, UK. The project will create up to 300 direct jobs during construction and operations, with wider positive impacts for the whole supply chain
Renewable & recycled carbon DME is a sustainable, cost-effective, and clean burning fuel that can help decarbonise Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) industry and off-grid energy sectors.
Once operational, the plant will have the capacity to produce over 50,000 tonnes of DME per year, helping the UK’s move to net-zero by decarbonising over five per cent of the UK’s LPG sector.
The site will take non-recyclable residual household, commercial and industrial waste and convert it into DME using KEW Technology’s proven and proprietary advanced gasification process, a form of Advanced Conversion Technology. The sustainable fuel will then be used by the UK LPG Industry in a variety of applications, benefiting homes and businesses in rural areas, not connected to the UK’s national gas grid.
Over 2 million homes use LPG or high carbon fuels, oil or coal, for heating, as well as hundreds of thousands of businesses. LPG suppliers can blend DME with LPG, to instantly reduce the carbon footprint of its fuel, or switching off-grid energy customers to 100 per cent Renewable & Recycled Carbon DME, as rural areas transition to Net Zero.
This plant is set to be operational in 2025 and will throughout the project life cycle create up to 300 local jobs, around 250 in the construction phase and then 50 highly skilled direct roles once in full operation with dozens more indirect jobs across the feedstock supply and fuels offtake supply chain. The additional benefit to the operation is that the plant will take in and treat non-recyclable residual waste in a more efficient and environment-friendly manner, averting increased volumes being incinerated or going to landfill.
“We are at an exciting stage of bringing the first waste-to-DME plant in the UK to reality at Teesworks,” said Kamal Kalsi, managing director of Circular Fuels Ltd. “There is an urgent need to providing affordable energy to those off-grid homes and businesses who need it most and have little to no other alternative and to enhancing our national energy security as we seek to deliver net zero by 2050. Using this technology creates an affordable and secure low-carbon drop-in fuel that also enforces a more efficient utilisation of the waste resource to target harder to decarbonise sectors and maximise GHG savings.”
Tees Valley Combined Authority, NEPIC and BP are working in collaboration to deliver the industrial decarbonisation “Cluster Plan” to provide the roadmap to net zero across the whole Tees Valley industrial cluster.
The Cluster Plan includes over 40 industries across the region, including: CCS, hydrogen, renewable power, energy from waste, bio-fuels, circular economy industries and infrastructure. All of these industries have contributed data to the Cluster Plan project to provide the future CO2 emissions and capture planning and to identify barriers and enablers to achieving net zero.
Circular Fuels Ltd (CFL) is a joint venture between Dimeta (a joint-venture between SHV Energy and UGI International; the world’s two largest LPG market players) and KEW Technology (a sustainable energy solutions company).
