Focus on Energy & Renewables: £500m Biomass plant has Chemical Engineers excited
Tue 28 Jul 2009
The announcement last week that the £500m Tees Renewable Energy Plant has received planning consent has created excitement amongst UK Chemical Engineers. The 295MW capacity plant will enter commercial operation in late 2012 and will be one of the largest-ever biomass plants to be built in the world.
The project, being developed by MGT Power, will create 600 jobs during the three year construction period, 150 permanent jobs during the station’s lifetime and support a further 300 jobs indirectly. It is hoped that a good number of these positions may need Chemical Engineering expertise. The vast majority of renewable energy job announcements so far during 2009 have been related to Wind and Wave Energy, neither of which particularly suits the Chemical Engineer.
Ryan Kevelighan, Renewable Energy Consultant for SRG Engineering, a specialist technical recruitment company based in the UK, explains: “The renewable energy job market has the potential to expand at a vast rate, but so far in 2009 the vast majority of new opportunities are for Civil, Mechanical and Electrical Engineers mostly for Wind Farm installations in the UK. There have been very few opportunities for Chemical Engineers to date and, while we have had many approach us to ask about opportunities within the renewable energy sector, we haven’t had much good news to tell them”. Until now that is.
Biomass projects convert biological material, typically wood or waste, into energy through either thermal, chemical or biochemical conversion. Many of these projects are process orientated and thus the experience and skills of chemical, bio-chemical and pharmaceutical engineers can be effectively utilised.
Details of the jobs at the Tees Renewable Plant have yet to be released and, at the time of writing the article, we had been unable to obtain any further information from MGT Power. The omens could be good. The Managing Director of MGT Power is a Chemical Engineer.