A firm developing hydrogen production from waste plastic has been offered a conditional £1.25m grant for a planned plastics-to-hydrogen facility at Protos, near Ellesmere Port.

Waste2Tricity, the company developing the technology – dubbed DMG®, short for “Distributed Modular System” – says there has been significant progress towards its commercialisation. It has also recently signed (22 December) an Agreement to be acquired by partner company PowerHouse Energy Group. The acquisition is subject to the approval of regulators and both sets of shareholders.

PowerHouse Energy is working in collaboration with Peel Environmental, who have completed their review of the completed engineering work and moved to commit to the next stage of development and engineering for the Protos Energy Park.

The design has progressed such that the DMG® facilities at Protos would have the capacity to process 35 tonnes per day of waste plastics, targeting to produce 3.8MWe on site and exporting 3.4MWe electricity and up to 2 tonnes of hydrogen per day from the site.

The collaborative project aims to develop a minimum of 11 sites in the UK for DMG® facilities. Peel has a strategy to develop “Plastic Parks” where waste plastics are recycled and regenerated. The plan is to bring together potential counterparties for waste, power and hydrogen with a net negative CO2 contribution for each site.

These “plastic parks” will ultimately create a countrywide plastic circular economy, say the developers, with each site creating a local source of hydrogen which could be used as a clean and low-cost fuel for buses, Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) and cars.