The exhaust pipes from the 12 burners at Eco Biomass (NI) Ltd in Kildress. Photos: Michael Cullen.

A Co Tyrone business was set up with 12 biomass boilers in the same building under the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) for the purpose of drying woodchippings, some of which supplies other boilers, the Ulster Herald can reveal.

Eco Biomass (NI) Ltd was established by Dungannon businessman Tom Spence on September 1, 2015 at the start of the three month spike in applications to the non-domestic RHI scheme.

Some 984 new applications were received during this contentious period, just after the cut to the subsidy was announced and before it was implemented, significantly increasing the overall cost of the scheme to an estimated £490m.

Eco Biomass Ltd, which Mr Spence describes as a legitimate wood drying business, runs the 12 boilers from a warehouse at Kildress, just off the main Omagh to Cookstown road.

Sourced from local forests, the local company chips round logs into a series of large metal containers, where it is dried by one dozen biomass boilers, also encased in metal containers.

The product is then sold on for other uses. There is no suggestion of any illegality.

Speaking to the Ulster Herald on Wednesday, Mr Spence said, “We’re a legitimate business providing to power stations and other farmers and other local people, but the bulk of it is not going to other burners.”

He declined to elaborate on the term ‘power stations’.

From Bush, just outside Dungannon, the 65-year-old businessman is involved in a series of companies across the construction and recycling sector.

Mr Spence is also among the RHI recipients who have formed a group to represent their interests against the backdrop of plans to name all recipients and curb the payments.


“I am signed up to an organisation which will be challenging most things to do with it,” he said.

Mr Spence said he was concerned at being “criminalised” in light of what he described as “scaremongering” by the media in its the coverage of the RHI scandal.

“We simply availed of the opportunity that was there and presented to us. There is nothing illegal about that, there’s certainly nothing to be demonised or criminalised about.”