Making fuel from waste
Portrait
“Supplying secondary fuels has been something of an uphill struggle for some time,” says CEO and company founder Karel Jennissen. “With the growing pressure to stop using fossil fuels like coal, companies are starting to look more closely at alternatives.”
According to Mr. Jennissen, companies can target significant cost savings by replacing up to 100% of traditional fuels such as lignite, bituminous coal and coke with alternative fuels such as Subcoal® pellets.
“Subcoal® is a proprietary technology to upgrade RDF (refuse-derived fuel) and SRF (solid recovered fuel) into pellets,” explains Mr. Jennissen. “The pellets have a high calorific value but unlike coal are not a fossil fuel and therefore do not add to carbon emissions.” The pellets can be mixed in with bituminous coal or petcoke and ground without requiring modifications to the installation. Even higher substitution rates can be achieved with dedicated equipment.
N+P has been recycling industrial residues for almost 25 years and has developed into the pre-eminent specialist in this niche. Its success comes from its global approach to the logistics of recycling.
“We have long-term contracts with suppliers and customers which allow us to source the materials we need to produce fuels that will meet the specifications of our clients,” explains Mr. Jennissen. “This usually means materials with a calorific value over 20 MJ.” Customer contracts typically last between five and ten years and cover the supply of as much as 100,000 t of fuel. N+P is active all over Europe and increasingly in the Middle East.
“We have developed between 40 and 50 projects in the cement and gasification industries to date,” says Mr. Jennissen. “We are in the process of obtaining a license to carry out a project in Brazil.”
To meet the rapid rise in demand, N+P is currently setting up a new factory in the northeast of the UK, from which it will export recycled fuels to Scandinavia, the Baltic states, Portugal and Cyprus.
“There is a huge surplus in waste materials in the UK, and we hope to stimulate internal demand as well,” says Mr. Jennissen. The company has plans to build additional factories in the Netherlands and the UK in the next three years. “Growth has been extraordinary in the last few years and we are on target to achieve our goal of doubling turnover in the next three to five years,” concludes Mr. Jennissen.