Peel to accelerate UK waste-to-hydrogen project

London — Peel Environmental is to take charge of development of a first commercial plastics-to-hydrogen production plant at the Protos Energy Park in Cheshire, technology company PowerHouse said Tuesday.

Powerhouse, Peel and Waste2Tricity signed a contract in August last year to develop a 35 mt a day plastics recycling facility generating electricity and hydrogen at the Protos Park in Cheshire.

The plant will use PowerHouse's distributed modular generation gasification reactor technology, which converts unrecyclable plastics into carbon-neutral hydrogen that can be used to generate electricity or power fuel cell electric vehicles.

Powerhouse also has a contract with Peel to develop 10 further sites.

Now a supplemental agreement allows Peel to act as the developer at Protos and four further DMG sites, pending acquisition of W2T by PowerHouse, the companies said.

The agreement includes a GBP500,000 ($646,000) annual license fee payable by Peel to PowerHouse per project on commissioning.

"The current trialing of the proposed plastic waste stream in the process demonstrator is continuing, with excellent gas production results for the output levels expected," said PowerHouse CEO David Ryan.

"Hydrogen is set to play a major role in the UK's clean growth strategy," said Peel managing director Myles Kitcher. The DMG process would be commercialized at Protos first before roll-out at other sites across the country, he said.

The unit can generate 1 mt of road-fuel quality H2 and 58 MWh/day of electricity.