Cooking oil-to-power in Yorkshire

REG Bio-Power has now spent over a year producing power from used cooking oil at its first-of-its-kind, 18 MW site in Whitemoor, North Yorkshire, with the help of 10 Finning Caterpillar 3516 BHD engines. The engines are fuelled with used cooking oil, which is collected by REG from restaurants, food processing plants and household waste recycling centres in partnership with local councils and waste contractors.

After being collected, the used oil is taken to a REG recovery facility where it is filtered into a proprietary biofuel called LF100. The Whitemoor site itself is unmanned most of the time, with the control system being remotely managed by Finning.

‘Reliability is also a major concern for REG as the Whitemoor site has been contracted to supply the UK’s Short-Term Operating Reserve (STOR) programme, which is designed to supply the National Grid with enough power to cope with unexpected spikes in demand,’ says Mark Radford, Project Manager at Finning.