Torftech wins Exporter of the Year award from British Polish Chamber of Commerce ('BPCC')
David Thomas, BPCC chairman, Martin Oxley, the BPCC’s CEO and Roger Hogkiss, CEO of Link4 presented Martin Groszek, Group Managing Director of the Torftech Group, with the BPCC ‘Exporter of the Year’ award for 2010 at Warsaw’s Hilton Hotel on 29th April.
To quote the BPCC ‘Torftech is very much a company for our time. Having developed an innovative technology for the clean-burn of bio-waste through a system of gasification, the company settled on Poland as its manufacturing base. Over 100 of the bio-waste combusting boilers have been built in Świdnica and exported to countries such as Canada, Germany and Denmark. In June this year, the first commercial power plant in Poland using a Torftech bio-waste gasifier will open for business. Torftech's system of gasifying bio-waste such as straw reduces CO2 emissions by 92% compared with the burning of coal. The gasifiers produce between one and five megawatts of power as well as hot water for local housing. The potential for thousands of power plants like this across the agricultural areas of the world offers a sustainable alternative to coal powered generation.’
Posted on 7 May 2010 | 7:17 am
Mortimer Technology wins Queens Award for Enterprise in Innovation with TORBED Energy Technologies
The Mortimer Technology group of Thatcham, Berkshire, with its Torftech subsidiaries in the UK and Canada, is the proud recipient of a Queens Award for Enterprise in the Innovation category for 2010. The innovations that won the award were all based on a novel method of processing solids in gas streams invented by Chris Dodson and marketed under the trade name TORBED Energy Technologies. These are patented techniques for use in energy generation, mineral, chemical, petroleum and environmental process industries. More than 160 plants have now been installed internationally. These technologies have done for sections of the process industries what Sir James Dyson has done with the vacuum cleaner – revolutionised them!
Martin Groszek, Group Managing Director of Mortimer Technology, commented “We are delighted to have been selected to receive the Queens Award – as a small team, we have worked hard to anticipate the new emerging biomass and waste to energy markets and to develop appropriate technologies to meet what we anticipated to be rapidly growing demands. Our technologies are now ideally positioned to gain markets worth in excess of £700m for the applications that we have listed here.”
Mortimer Technology has been given the award specifically for developing:
- a new 'torrefaction' process for the conversion of biomass into a 'biocoal' in minutes (instead of 60m years!) which gives a 92% reduction in CO2 emissions against conventional pulverised coal as a fuel.
- a novel modular biomass gasification conversion unit for industrial and commercial scale heat and power plant which in Poland, for example, can reduce emissions by 22m tonnes CO2 annually with a 20% market penetration in their heating stations.
- a novel process for turning paper ‘sludge’ from paper recycling mills (1 tonne sludge for every tonne of paper processed) into steam energy for the paper mill and a valuable mineral feed for the cement industry.
- a new combustion process for rice husks to provide energy and a valuable amorphous silica as a cement displacement.
Posted on 20 April 2010 | 10:58 am
Topell Energy of Netherlands to construct 60,000 tonne/annum biomass torrefaction plant using TORBED Energy Technologies
Topell Energy of the Netherlands was granted a worldwide license in 2008 to use the TORBED Technology for converting biomass into ‘biocoal’ pellets. A demonstration plant was established by Topell in 2009 and tonnage samples have been successfully produced. With funding from RWE Innogy, the first full scale production plant, with a production capacity of 60,000 tonnes per year, is now in manufacture for installation during 2010 at Duiven in Eastern Holland. Biocoal pellets have a very high energy density as well as significantly improved product properties and can be burned together with coal in conventional power plants (co-firing).
The process developed by Topell can be applied to various raw organic materials - even comparatively difficult biomass, such as roots and switch grass, are converted into pellets through mild pyrolysis, torrefaction, using the TORBED Reactor technology and finally, pelletisation.
The production process guarantees high flexibility with the regard to the raw material used; it is therefore unnecessary to draw on foodstuffs. Biocoal is also easy to transport. For co-firing with conventional coal, no further infrastructure measures, e.g. separate storage or crushing, are required.
Posted on 18 January 2010 | 7:31 am
TORBED biomass gasification technology selected for first Polish district heating station retrofit
Posted on 8 January 2010 | 8:22 am
Industrial scale TORBED paper sludge combustor installed and commissioned at Atlantic Packaging Products
The Torftech Group is pleased to announce the successful commissioning of a new process for the conversion of paper mill ‘sludge’ to energy and a valuable mineral stream. Utilizing their proprietary TORBED® process Reactor Technology, Torftech has developed a technique whereby paper sludge, containing 50-60% water, can be calcined at high temperature utilizing the calorific value of the waste wood fibre it contains to provide a significant portion of the process energy required. A conventional Heat Recovery Steam Generator, or ‘boiler’, is used to extract heat from the exhaust gases and produce steam for the paper mill. By this means:
- Increasing disposal costs are avoided
- Valuable energy is generated
- Recyclable mineral filler is produced
- Environmental emissions are reduced
With increasing disposal and energy costs typical straight payback of investment for such a plant can be less than 18 months.
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This concept was conceived by Torftech (Canada) Inc to respond to the growing environmental and economic pressures on a well respected Ontario based paper recycling company to find an alternative to disposal for their process sludge. Atlantic Packaging Products Ltd supported initial trials of the process at Torftech Canada’s pilot scale facility in Mississauga. With the encouraging results from the pilot trials, Atlantic applied, successfully, to Sustainable Development Technology Canada (www.sdtc.ca) for funding support for a commercial demonstration of the concept. This facilitated the design, installation and commissioning of the demonstration facility sized to process all of the sludge generated at Atlantic’s paper mill in Scarborough, Ontario in Canada.
After extensive trials and process development, the 6 tonne per hour plant is fully operational producing more than 18,000 kg/h (42,000 lb/h) of steam and 1 tonne per hour of calcined mineral filler with a pale grey colour with potential for use as a partial substitute for cement in concrete or as a feed material to a cement kiln.
With ever increasing disposal costs for paper sludge, likely penalties for methane or CO2 emissions from decomposing sludge when land-filled or spread, steadily increasing energy prices, this new process will be most welcome to the paper industry.
Posted on 20 October 2008 | 6:08 pm
First commercial TORBED gasification reactor installed and commissioned at Vlissingen in Holland
This unit is has been installed as part of a system supplied by Polow Energy Systems BV who have many years experience from developing systems for converting various sources of organic resources such as poultry litter and wood waste into valuable energy. This first gasification reactor is capable of gasifying 750 kg/h of wood waste which produces some 3.5MWth of energy for the client’s drying system.
This application of the TORBED Process Reactor Technology represents a significant advance in the gasification of wastes such as wood. This new process, on which patent protection has been granted, provides dramatic improvements including:
- Real time control over the process – no discernable lead/lag
- High turndown ratio
- Tolerance of wide range of feed particle size range and moisture content
- Rapid start up/shut down
- Low solids hold up provides protection from feed blockages or interruption
Posted on 12 August 2008 | 6:19 pm
Wuhan and Beijing, China
During 14-18th January, our chairman, Chris Dodson, was selected to represent our company on a seminar mission to Wuhan and Beijing in China, timed to coincide with Gordon Brown’s visit on 18th January. This timing allowed him to attend the business summit on behalf of British businesses.
The subjects on which this group of 12 companies gave presentations ranged from carbon capture, through CO2 credits to power production from rice husks using a TORBED® combustor. It was a very high profile ‘ministerial level’ mission and was well received by all levels of Chinese society that they interfaced with.
The mission was very professionally put together by UK Trade and Investment and British Expertise. They arranged and paid for the venues, meals and event dinners throughout the 5 day mission – all of which were to a very high standard indeed. The UK participants met or spoke with some 200 Chinese enterprises. The Chinese, whose ruling body are predominantly engineers/scientists, are taking climate change issues very seriously - whole cities have recently been designated ‘green/sustainable’ cities with funding allocated to go after these ideals.
Wen Jiabao, the Premier of the Peoples Republic of China, and Gordon Brown exchanged commitments to nearly double trade between China and the UK to some £60bn. It is hoped that this will include many rice husk and other biomass fired systems based on our TORBED® Technologies!
Posted on 15 January 2008 | 6:27 pm