PowerHouse Energy has inked a deal to acquire Waste2Tricity, the UK firm which claims to have found a way to produce hydrogen from waste plastic.
PowerHouse Energy and Waste2Tricity have already teamed up with developers Peel Environmental to develop 11 'waste plastic to hydrogen' facilities across the UK backed by £150m of investment.
The takeover still needs approval from regulators and both sets of shareholders, but assuming it goes ahead the new combined company is expected to reap "substantial annual licencing and engineering services revenue from these 'plastic parks'", the first of which is expected to be in commissioning by the end of 2020.
"We welcome this acquisition by PowerHouse Energy, with whom we have worked closely over a number of years," said John Hall, managing director of Waste2Tricity.
The plants will use advanced thermal treatment technology that could "transform the way waste plastics are dealt with nationally", PowerHouse Energy said. Waste2Tricity's Distributed Modular Generation (DMG) technology was developed by scientists at the University of Cheshire and uses unrecyclable plastics as a fuel to produce hydrogen. Up to 200 sites could be deployed in the UK in total, it said.
Hall stressed using plastics as fuel could reduce the environmental impact they have as litter. "By monetising scrap plastic DMG can divert plastic for destruction rather than ending up in rivers, as well as processing recovered ocean plastic," he added. "Poorly disposed of plastic is one of the world's great challenges and a number of major international companies can already see how DMG can offer an opportunity to reverse the plastic problem, both on land and in the Ocean."
