Matthias ran a car workshop at which Victor Buchanan was a customer, they got talking and in no time a new company had been formed and a DTI SMART award of £40,000 quickly followed to begin R&D. In total 19 burners went to Central America to help ancient coffee mills dry their coffee for export using their coffee husk waste instead of the forest lumber they were using. Bioflames equipment is still responsible for the conservation of 60,000m3 of rainforest every year - equivalent to half of the wood felled in Yorkshire every year.
The trio were joined in 2004 by FD John Wright who was asked after a trip with Victor to the Le Mans 24hr race if he knew a good FD. John brought further investment and the missing financial cornerstone to the business.
The company then spent a couple of years trying unsuccessfully to develop a gasification 'front-end' and therefore it is no surprise to us that gasification has become a 'dirty' word in the 'space' of energy from waste after many others have similarly failed to make it work. This big lesson for Bioflame had to be learnt before we really got our focus.
Going back to the roots of the original technology has allowed Bioflame to develop a plant to be fully compliant with all relevant emission legislation and the current business plan is to establish at least twenty joint venture sites over the next few years. Having previously established three heat only plants in the UK (one ran on food waste, one on hatchery waste and the other was fuelled by railway sleeper waste) the first JV site was established at Caythorpe in Lincolnshire with our partners Mid-UK Recycling Ltd.
Before the system in Caythorpe was installed and to prove that the concept would work, Bioflame built a £2.5m demonstration power station running on local wood waste at it's base within the North Yorkshire National Park with the help of FEY and Yorkshire Forward. This site was fully permissioned and made capable of exporting electricity to the National Grid. The exercise of getting these permissions (planning, environmental and grid-connection) is now something that we are expert in and we can boast an exceptional record in this regard having recently secured our 14th planning permission in succession.
The client for the sleeper system was so impressed with his original system that he invested in this business and has now ordered his own 2.5 MWh full electrical plant. This plant will be connected to the National Grid and will be commissioned by Summer 2010. The second JV site will also be commissioned into service at around the same time.
We now press on through 2010 and the outlook is very bright indeed. Employing 22 people directly and over 100 indirectly we are currently building three further plants and long lead orders are placed for number five.