It’s difficult to keep up. Almost every day, a press release, a photo op, a planning application, a planning appeal. Another new pop-up waste incinerator is planned for Teesside.
Greenwashing
Teesside is already Ground Zero for waste burning, but a motley crew of venture capitalists, greenwashers, and just plain chancers want to jump into the already-crowded pool. Sometimes they’ll call it a biomass facility to throw us off the scent, but the reality is that they just want to burn more stuff. Here on Teesside we’re already burning the domestic waste of nearly four million people. If the promoters get their way, it’ll increase to ten million. Here is a map of all of the existing and proposed facilities on Teesside.
Redcar’s pop up incinerator on life support?
Tees Valley Mayor Lord Houchen’s desire to build an incinerator 450 metres away from one of the poorest communities in the UK may be in trouble. This is the Tees Valley Energy recovery Facility (TVERF). Luckily for the people of Grangetown, Houchen didn’t think his pop-up incinerator scheme through, and he’s failed to hook it up to the electricity network. Newcastle-upon-Tyne Council, one of the TVERF partners, has been advised that this plan to burn the waste of 2.3 million people has been delayed by at least two years because of Houchen’s National Grid failure. And the longer the project drags on, the less political gain there is for the Tees Valley Mayor. But pop-up incinerators have a life of their own, and we can’t write this one off yet.
Stockton’s zombie incinerator
On 11 April 2024, a company called Solar 21 revived a dormant planning application to build an incinerator called the Tees Green Energy Park (TGEP). A red flag straight away here – their use of euphemisms. Don’t call it an incinerator. Not only is it green, it’s actually a park, and it provides energy. What’s not to like? Inexplicably, Stockton Council’s planning committee signed this off, despite Solar 21 failing to explain where the 240,000 tonnes per year (TPA) of waste that they intended to burn would come from. This would serve a population of about 600,000 people. Where do these people live? Even more bizarrely, on 21 July we discovered that somebody ‘called in’ the planning application within days of the approval in April, and that it’s now being reviewed by officials in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), so this scheme may pop down as quickly as it popped up. But never say never.
Imported waste?
There’s been a rash of river-based pop-up incinerator plans too. The above-mentioned TGEP may be planning to bring their waste in by road, but there are plans to build six incinerators next to the river Tees. This provides an option to import waste, an important option, keeping in mind that all of the RDW (Refuse Derived Waste) generated in the North East of England is already being burned in existing incinerators. The RDW can be brought in from anywhere in the world. The first two of these planned incinerators are at the mouth of the river:The Graythorp Energy Centre to the west, and the Redcar Energy Centre to the East.
White elephant’s graveyard
Moving just upstream, MGT Teesside at Teesport. The advantage here is that this incinerator already exists, a biomass white elephant that was ostensibly built to burn wood pellets. But it’s never burned anything, despite the £650m price tag. However, once you’ve built one of these, the waste can come from anywhere. Continuing upriver, also on PD Ports property, the Teesport Renewable Energy Centre in South Bank. On the opposite bank, Port Clarence Energy. Just as with MGT Teesside, this is another white elephant wood-pellet biomass plant that has never operated. This one was completed five years ago, although in January 2024 they received an Environment Agency permit to burn RFD. I thought they might.
Incinerator cluster
To complete the six river Tees incinerators, Billingham Reach EfW. If built, this will be just down the road from the two giant Suez incinerators at Haverton Hill.
The biomass scam
We’ve seen one element of the biomass scam – how ‘biomass’ can suddenly morph into waste burning. But there’s more extensive kidology going on. So-called ‘green’ biomass is effectively a ruse to defer the burning of material so that it takes place elsewhere. Teesside is becoming world-beating at this sleight of hand, with the former ICI complex at Wilton at its centre. Ensus already turns one million tonnes of wheat per annum into 400 million litres of E10 petrol additive. But there are no fewer than three Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) plants planned here – Nova Pangaea, Abundia A-Jet and Arcadia e-fuels. The SAF plants have received a lot of publicity, but their potential may be overblown. For example, if Nova Pangaea is ever built, the UK aviation industry would burn the equivalent of its entire annual output in 90 minutes*.
*UK annual aviation fuel consumption 15bn litres. Nova Pangaea annual production 2.7m litres
Yep, more incinerators
And of course, for a side gig, the complex includes the Wilton10 wood-burning incinerator and the Wilton 11 incinerator, which burns the waste of the 1.5 million citizens of Merseyside and Halton. For information, this is a list of the Teesside incinerators:
And more sustainable aviation fuel
At Dorman Point, about a kilometre away from Wilton, Circular Fuels will transform 200,000 TPA of domestic waste into synthetic Liquid Petroleum Gas. Where will this domestic waste come from? Enough with the difficult questions. Next door, Willis Sustainable Fuels will make SAF from CO2 and green hydrogen at some point in the far future. The above mentioned TVERF will make up the trio at Dorman Point. It’ll be the UK’s worst industrial estate. To complete the SAF list, Teesside’s fifth planned facility, Lighthouse Green Fuels, is planned to be located at Seal Sands in Billingham. It’s by far the biggest though, with a projected annual output of 124 million litres. But the SAF will be made from biogenic and non-biogenic wastes, and this sounds like techno-optimism. Here is a list of the planned biomass facilities:
How green is all this?
Almost all the five million tonnes of material planned to be transported to these Teesside facilities will come by road. In the case of the biomass and SAF plants, the finished product will need to be sent back by road too. The Wilton 11 incinerator is the only one that is rail-served. The amount of stuff burned on Teesside is already a disaster for the planet, and it will get worse if drastic action isn’t taken to rein all of these projects in. Back on 5 April 2024, the previous Conservative administration had a nervous breakdown about the sheer number of incinerators being built, so they announced a moratorium on new builds. But the moratorium ended on 24 May 2024. Perhaps the new Labour government could review the situation, encouraging local authorities to reverse declining recycling rates, and put an end to the gravy train of incinerator building.
Your own pop-up incinerator
So why did we add to this free-for-all by introducing slack planning laws that encourage people to junk their central heating boilers and replace them with wood-burning stoves? It satisfies a primeval urge, apparently, in case the combat gear and the Mitsubishi Shogun aren’t doing it for you. And you needn’t stop at logs. As soon as your ‘wood burning’ stove is in place you can throw anything into the mix. A few tonnes of cheap knock-off coal, for example? Newspapers, magazines and plastic bottles burn well too. You can make your neighbours’ lives a misery while simultaneously spewing CO2 and PM2.5 particulates into the atmosphere.
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