It used to be called incineration, but the new and improved version is ‘energy from waste’, and we are about to get such a plant in the Bradford district.

Surprisingly, it isn’t the one that the Government pulled the plug on for Bradford and Calderdale councils. Rather it’s a smaller commercial one on the site of the old Keighley gas works, at Marley, on the bypass.

This bit of the Aire Valley has been providing energy for nearly 200 years, with the first coal gas production starting in 1825, and it continued until competition from the North Sea closed it down in the Sixties.

A considerable amount of money has been spent on cleaning up the site, including much of the tar that penetrated the soil and local water courses. The new scheme promises better habits, and has been approved by the planners. As well as three different energy-from-waste processes, there will be a large office block, a visitor centre and cycle access.

The ambition is to keep waste out of landfill, to add more electricity to an overstretched National Grid, and to reduce the import of power and fuels.

The main process will be an RDF plant – refuse derived fuel – using local treated waste. The heat will be used to produce steam to turn generators, and at full tilt it could produce enough electricity for the whole of Keighley.

Emissions will be cleaned and filtered before emerging from a 200ft high chimney, which the East Riddlesden Hall National Trust view with disapproval.

A smaller unit, the bio-fuel plant, will melt plastic waste and turn it back into the oil that it was originally made from. It is expected that it could produce up to 20 million litres of diesel in a year, with further quantities of oil coming from the third process – pyrolysis.

This involves crumbling up waste tyres and heating them in the absence of oxygen to end up with more oil and a product called biochar. The latter is a very complex arrangement of carbon that increases soil fertility and helps trap CO2 from the atmosphere.

On the positive side, the project will reduce the amount of waste in the district, and provide up to 200 jobs, but the level of CO2 emissions from the combined processes is not clear, though it’s certainly better than accidental burning.

Another interesting development in our area is the plan by Crossley Evans, the scrap firm in Shipley, to build a plant to convert clean timber into pellets for burning at the Drax power station. They would go the short distance by rail, which is certainly preferable to shipping them from the United States.