New Earth closes refinancing of £60m Avonmouth Energy Recovery Facility with Macquarie
New Earth Solutions Group Ltd, the provider of innovative treatment solutions for residual household and similar waste, has partially re-financed its ground-breaking Avonmouth Energy Recovery Facility (ERF) in UK with a debt facility from Macquarie Bank.
Darren Stockley, Managing Director of New Earth stated:
All our six operational plants now include bank finance. For two we used “conventional” project finance through the construction stage, but the others, which include the Avonmouth ERF, we re-financed post commissioning. By this means we have been able to build new infrastructure quickly using novel processes through a period of general constriction in the availability of bank debt. We expect now to be able to fund our next development projects for which planning permissions, waste contracts, and land have been lined up.
The Avonmouth ERF is a first of a kind ERF using pyrolysis and gasification equipment supplied by NEAT Technology Group Ltd (NTGL) to process up to 120,000 tonnes per year of Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) from New Earth’s adjacent Mechanical and Biological Treatment (MBT) facility. Its electrical power output is up to 12 MW nett, of which 1 MW is provided under a “private wire” agreement to the MBT.
New Earth’s Avonmouth MBT was commissioned in 2011 and mainly processes residual waste under contract from local authorities in the West of England area and South Wales plus commercial waste and industrial waste from the region. The RDF was previously exported, at cost to New Earth, to northern Europe.
Mark Scobie, Chief Executive of New Earth and NTGL commented:The ERF passed strict technical and operating tests prior to the refinancing. We believe that this demonstrates the potential of our NEAT pyrolysis and gasification process as a game changer in the waste management and resource recovery space.
NTGL reports considerable interest in NEAT technology from the UK and world-wide. Mark Scobie added:
Without pro-active marketing we have built a sizeable potential pipeline of projects including some strong opportunities with funding, contracted feedstock, and consents in place. The scale of projects differs as does the emphasis on potential outputs, which include electricity, heat and products like gas, oil, and char. Our R&D is focussed on smaller but scalable energy projects and there is also strong demand for the Avonmouth sized ERFs that we can now deliver.
