BioReGen project expands: greening brownfield sites with energy crops and biofuels

A pioneering EU-funded project which could green thousands of acres of derelict brownfield sites in North East England while providing climate friendly bioenergy is expanding after successful trials. The University of Teesside’s Clean Environment Management Centre (CLEMANCE) is using energy crops to clean up contaminated sites once used by industry, a process known as phytoremediation. The combination of phytoremediation, wildlife habitat restoration and renewable bioenergy and biofuel production offers a win-win-win synergy - sustainability at its best.

Entitled BioReGen ('Biomass, Remediation, reGeneration'), the project began in 2004 with test planting at several small brownfield sites, the first being a former enamel works at Fylands Bridge, near Bishop Auckland, County Durham. The willow trees and the miscanthus, reed canary and switch grasses cleaned up the soil by absorbing contaminants such as zinc, copper, cadmium and heavy metals in coal ash. Plants break these pollutants down into harmless byproducts and either incorporate them into their roots, stems and leaves or release the clean substances into the air (schematic, click to enlarge).

BioReGen believes the method can work on bigger sites and planting has now been carried out on five larger areas, each covering a hectare and all with a history of heavy industrial use. The five full-scale demonstration sites are at: (1) the former Haverton Hill shipyard on the River Tees, near the Transporter Bridge; (2) part of the old Head Wrightson engineering site, at the Tees Barrage, made famous by Margaret Thatcher’s Walk in the Wilderness during a visit to Teesside two decades ago; (3) a former colliery and coal yard at Binchester, near Bishop Auckland, County Durham; (4) Warden Law, a landfill site, and former gravel pit, near Sunderland; (5) a former sewage treatment works at Rainton Bridge, near Houghton-le-Spring, Wearside.

CLEMANCE believes the work, supported by a €1.2 million grant from the European Union’s LIFE-Environment research programme, has major implications for greening the industrial landscape of the past.

When we started this project, we did not know if we could grow plants on such contaminated land but it has been a success everywhere we have tried it. We have proved that phytoremediation works and what works on a small site can also do so on much larger sites as well. It is also much cheaper than having to clean up a site or remove contaminated soils to landfill sites. Developers looking to do that spend millions of pounds per hectare, whereas our method costs only tens of thousands of pounds. - Dr Richard Lord, CLEMANCE’s Programme Leader for Contaminated Land and Water

The potential of the project is described as 'huge', because there are 1,155 hectares of brownfield land in the Tees Valley alone. However, the old dirty industrial past stretches across the entire industrialised world and has transformed much of its landscape into sites that need to be cleaned up.

Phytoremediation is not a quick fix, though. To get a site ready for development through this method could take years but BioReGen thinks it is on the right track (however, recently scientists designed an energy crop with a vastly improved phytoremediation capacity, speeding up the process considerably - more here). CLEMANCE researchers regard their activity as a holding operation until the sites are needed for industry again. In the meantime, the greened sites are made attractive again, and good wildlife habitats, rather than visions of unsightly dereliction which blight the image of the North-East. The project is helping to turn the Tees Valley - the ultimate symbol of a polluted landscape - into a 'Trees Valley' instead.

But then the story gets even better. CLEMANCE has been negotiating with energy provider SembCorp about providing willow to the company’s recently-opened Wilton 10 biomass power station, on the Wilton International site near Redcar, east Cleveland:
energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: climate change :: brownfield :: pollution :: energy crops :: phytoremediation :: EU ::

Wilton 10 is a £60m biomass power station, the first of its type in the UK, which began generating this summer and is capable of producing energy for 30,000 properties. Operated by SembCorp Utilities UK, it burns wood, a classic example of an infinitely renewable fuel which is also ‘carbon neutral’.

Wilton 10 is helping to sustain the planting and harvesting of woodland and is a development which neatly ties in with the pioneering phytoremediation project.

When the willow has been coppiced, or cut back, the resulting timber could help feed Wilton 10’s voracious appetite for 300,000 tonnes of wood a year. Forty per cent of the station’s required timber will be recycled and a similar amount will eventually be sourced from energy crops, such as those planted by CLEMANCE.

According to Dr Lord, Wilton 10 has a huge appetite for timber and BioReGen can help provide it, particularly if it expands its planting over larger areas. What started as a research project has thus found a commercial application.

Wilton 10 could provide a real opportunity to commercialise our work by using willow trees as an energy crop. This is as sustainable as it gets. Wilton 10 has already generated national and international interest. - Dr Lord

It doesn't come as a surprise that other researchers, both in the EU and the US, are looking at creating similar win-win situations.

Recently, scientists led by the University of Washington's Sharon Doty reported that they succeeded in genetically engineering poplar plants with a dramatically improved capacity to clean up contaminated sites. Doty, an assistant professor of forest resources, told Biopact that the ideal end of phytoremediation projects based on the trees would be to use the plants as a bioenergy feedstock. After all, poplar has been identified as a promising, fast-growing energy crop (previous post).

Other scientists in France looked at miscanthus, an energy crop, to clean up brown fields (more here); Michigan State University researchers are working on a similar project and are examining the possibility that some oilseed crops like soybeans, sunflower and canola, and other crops such as corn and switchgrass, can be grown on abandoned industrial sites for use in ethanol or biodiesel fuel production (previous post). Finally, scientists have identified hybrid poplars as good candidates for soaking up and cleaning polluted water from coal mining sites (earlier post).

BioReGen is short for "Biomass, Remediation reGeneration: Re-using brownfield sites for renewable energy crops". It is a 4-5 year project funded by the EU's Life III Environment Programme to investigate whether brownfield sites can be used to grow plants for fuel.


Photo: University of Teesside researchers planting energy crops to phytoremediate a polluted site under an EU-sponsored project called BioReGen. Credit: BioReGen.

References:
AlphaGalileo: Pioneering project helps to transform brownfield sites into the ‘Trees Valley' - December 10.

John Dean, "Green Revolution", Research & Enterprise, a University of Teesside Magazine, Issue Six, pp. 34-35 (December 2007).

BioReGen project website.

Biopact: Scientists dramatically improve poplar's capacity to clean up polluted sites - potential to couple phytoremediation to bioenergy - October 17, 2007

Biopact: Turning brownfields into greenfields with the help of biofuels - August 09, 2006

Biopact: Energy crops may soak up methane water - August 15, 2006