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Gloucestershire Business News

EXCLUSIVE: Ecotricity boss rubbishes claims of trouble at the gas mill

Prominent green industrialist Dale Vince, OBE, has hit back at "inaccurate" reports on an alleged failure by his Stroud-based power supply firm Ecotricity to develop a pioneering "gas-from-grass" process.

As reported by Punchline-Gloucester.com yesterday, fresh annual accounts from the Stroud-based Green Britain Group (GBG), the parent company for Ecotricity as well as Nailsworth-based Forest Green Rovers, vegan food firm the Devil's Kitchen and the mine-free Skydiamond venture, reported a 2023-24 £7m loss.

Among subsequent reports, the Telegraph newspaper suggested that Ecotricity's gas mill project, in Berkshire, had been scrapped amid a £12m loss for the Group – but as Punchline revealed, the opposite was now the case, with sources indicating that the innovative power generation mode from the new mill will be on stream for first domestic use within the next six months.

This morning, Mr Vince hit out against suggestions that the grass conversion scheme was shelved – and revealed that BURGERS will also be created direct from grass used in the fermentation process.

He told Punchline: "There's been some claims in the media that our green gas project has been scrapped. That's not accurate - surprise surprise. Using 100% grass to make gas is new territory - It's not been done before. We've found problems in our system design of our first mill to run purely on grass. So, we've shut down pending a rebuild."

He added: "The new version should be operational in the next six months using a blend of grass and other crops (no animal products)."

Ecotricity's percentage of grass-derived gas will be subsequently increased, he said, as part of the refinement stage of the pre-treatment works "that we believe are the key to successfully running 100% on grass, which we expect to achieve by around about this time next year."

Based on OFGEM revised TDCV medium household consumption for 2023, current plans are for the mill at Reading to produce enough green gas to supply 4,170 homes – saving up to 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

In parallel, Mr Vince added, Ecotricity is also "making good progress on the extraction of human edible protein and other nutrients from the same grass, which is something we intend to do before making gas."

Mr Vince, who has stated an ambition to overturn the common claim that grass cannot be eaten added: "We're close to a land use revolution - whereby for the first time we can make energy and food from the same piece of land - rather than one or the other. Exciting times."

●At a conference last year on politics and plant-based culture, Mr Vince told delegates: "One of my favourite football chants came from when Tranmere fans visited Forest Green Rovers and one of our players fell over. Their fans chanted "the dirty vegan b*****d, he's eating our grass!" That's classic football humour but it'll backfire on them in a year or two's time when they visit us, because we're going to feed them burgers made with grass protein – we're going to make those meat eaters eat grass!"

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