Glass Futures Secures Decarbonisation Research Funding
Glass Futures will continue to find solutions for decarbonising energy intensive industries thanks to £7m funding and £11m for its members from the UK government's Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero. The £54m Global Centre of Excellence in St Helens will be involved in three projects to pave the way for the glass and ceramic industries to drastically cut carbon emissions.
(1) Rapid and Dynamic Electric Boosting: Glass Futures will install an electric-boost system onto its 30tpd pilot plant to assess melting efficiency and the impact of convection currents, product quality and seed count. Guardian Glass will run a series of models to understand the most beneficial positioning of electrodes for up to 60% electric-boost. Encirc is working to develop automated techniques and control tools, which are capable of rapidly switching between combustion and electric. The project will also involve network operators E.ON and National Grid to assess the timescales and costs of upgrading grid networks.
(2) Low-cost biofuels for glass and ceramics: Biofuels have the potential to switch UK glass and ceramic sites from natural gas, this project will explore a variety of economically and technology attractive biofuels for a range of industrial glass and ceramic furnace sites. O-I, Ardagh, Encirc and Pilkington UK will trial biofuels on their furnaces and DSF on their refractories firing furnace.
(3) Demonstrating hydrogen in the ceramics sector: Glass Futures will work alongside the British Ceramics Consortium to demonstrate full hydrogen-firing technologies for the two main types of kiln used across 150+ manufacturing sites.
Richard Katz, CEO of Glass Futures, said: "Some ten years after the idea for Glass Futures was conceived it's fantastic to see such progression and the opening of our Global Centre of Excellence this summer. In addition, we have secured over £7m of funding directly and £11m for our members to really put our industrial scale test furnace to use. Without government funding like this much of our ground-breaking research to date wouldn't have been possible.”
