Frequently asked questions
Forestry management waste at BMEC, Wilseyville, California, USA
Business and strategy
Our mission is to help the world reduce waste and generate clean energy from it. You’ll find more information about our business by visiting our About page.
Our business strategy is built on three fundamental principles:
1) that we are global leaders in Advanced Gasification Technology;
2) that there is a growing demand for addressing local waste, creating localised, small- to medium-scale facilities, supporting local businesses and for producing environmentally friendly energy on a local, decentralised basis; and
3) that we consistently strong delivery of projects, commercial models and investment cases will command strong attention and respect in the waste-to-energy sector.
EQTEC aims to be as famous for on-time, on-budget project delivery as it aims to be for its advanced gasification solutions. Although the waste-to-energy sector does not have a strong track record with disciplined, timely delivery, we aim to apply our ecosystem of strong partners and its own capabilities with planning, delivery governance and risk management to drive delivery in time with project business cases.
Our growing network of partners includes a range of EPCs, EPCMs, owners engineers, project managers and developers, as well as financial managers and representatives who support access to funding. Together building a delivery framework for repeatable, sustainable use on projects, EQTEC and its partners are building a model for continual delivery success.
We are also building links with local communities and their leaders and connecting with governmental and public-interest groups to support awareness and understanding of gasification and Cleantech, more broadly.
You’ll also find more information about our business by visiting our
About page.
We have not directly encountered true competitors, nor do we expect to do so until the market matures for cleantech, waste-to-energy technologies and businesses. Of the pipeline opportunities announced over the past year or more, none involves competition with other gasification businesses or alternative technologies: all represent genuine interest in EQTEC technology specifically. At this stage of market development, there is plenty of opportunity to pursue for us and for a range of other, scalable, sustainable technologies. Our pursuit of market share therefore is not about taking market share from other cleantech businesses, but about widening awareness that cleantech such as ours exists, clarifying its benefits over legacy alternatives and evidencing that it provides a sustainable way to manage waste and generate energy and biofuel now and in the future. We foresee greater collaboration with other cleantech businesses before we foresee stringent competition or industry consolidation.
We convert waste into energy in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way. Our emissions footprint is far friendlier to the environment than that of alternative waste management methods, including other gasification technologies. Read more about this in Technology & Services.
Our technologies handle a wide variety of waste feedstocks: plant and agriculture biomass (for 1 – 10 MWe plants); forestry wood biomass (for 2 – 5 MWe plants); and Municipal solid wastes (for 5 – 30 MWe plants).
The feedstock is transformed into a pure synthesis gas suitable for a wide range of energy applications: Green electricity; Heat or steam; Liquid biofuels; Bio-synthetic natural gas (Bio-SNG); Synthetic natural gas (SNG); Hydrogen; and/or Biochar.
Our advanced gasification technology is proven and patented for waste-to-energy projects and the we are increasingly confident that it has the potential to become the UK and global standard for waste-to-energy. We want to collaborate with and gradually reduce our collective reliance on increasingly less environmentally friendly waste elimination methods such as traditional incineration. Our model is to deliver locally based, locally focused, green energy infrastructure across the UK and Europe and around the world.
In Europe, we have solid foundations from which we are expanding, including one under construction in Greece, plus three projects in development in the UK and one in development in Greece and the recommissioning of plants with EQTEC advanced gasification inside, in Italy and Croatia. In the USA, we are pioneering advanced gasification in California and working toward new opportunities in California and beyond. In Asia, interest is strong, based on the strength of our technologies and the significant advantages our technologies have over alternatives in Asian markets, with multiple opportunities in South Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Given the increasing market enthusiasm for our world leading gasification solutions for sustainable, waste-to-energy projects and given the size of our growing pipeline, 2021 is a year of opportunity as governments across the globe progress towards Net Zero and encourage green economic recovery.
Our single, greatest contribution to our mission is our synthesis gas (‘syngas’), produced to meet the most restrictive requirements. From a wide variety of waste feedstocks (we have tested over 50, from forestry, biomass and agricultural, industrial and municipal) the purity of the syngas makes it suitable for the widest range of applications, at scale.
EQTEC is regularly approached by a range of private- and public-sector entities interested in our technologies, and we have engaged a number of them accordingly.
We believe public policy toward incineration is at the early stages of transitioning and understand the enormous investment in such technology that has been made for the past several decades.
We are already working constructively with local authorities, MPs and other stakeholders for our Deeside, Southport and Billingham projects in the UK.
We are engaging at local, regional, national and pan-national (e.g., EU) levels to drive further consideration of innovative technologies such as ours, and we have appointed a dedicated expert to pursue a variety of public funding opportunities across the EU, UK and USA.
We look forward to announcing continued and deeper relationships with local authorities in the interest of advancing our propositions around small-scale, distributed, local energy security and independence.
Investor relations
The two largest investors in EQTEC are:
Altair Group Investment (19.0%)
Amati Global Investors: (5.43%)
Last updated 6 January 2022. For more information please visit
We currently have no plans to pay a dividend. Dividends are typically paid to shareholders once a business has established continuous cash flow based on consistent revenue and reasonable profitability. As a high growth business, we look in the near term to grow revenue, establish profitability and reinvest profits into further revenue growth which in turn should drive shareholder value through appreciation of the share price. When we believe greater shareholder value is achievable through dividends, we will consider issuing them.
As a public company we are not permitted to make forward-looking statements or provide financial information about future revenue or profit beyond the current year. As a discipline, we carry out long-term forecasting as part of our annual strategy and business planning activities, this information can be found in our Annual Reports.
Financial performance
Our latest annual report and financial results may be found here.
By the end of 2022, we expect to make fully operational two MDCs and two additional plants under construction for other owner-operators. We also expect to reach financial close on additional projects that extend existing propositions but also add new capabilities with different feedstock and new offtake applications. We are targeting continued, strong revenue growth and reduction in EBITDA losses, with planned investment in new and innovative projects that raise our visibility and range of propositions.
Operational and technical
No. EQTEC plants typically deliverer an unlevered Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 12-14%, which is higher than the average for utility wind or solar energy projects, which typically have a mid-to-high single-digit IRR.
Gasification has the lowest environmental impact of all energy-from-waste (EfW) technologies.
The process of gasification does not create many of the harmful emissions that other forms of waste to energy do, such as incineration. Gasification 1) cuts down on landfill 2) reduces Co2, methane, hydrofluorocarbons, tropospheric ozone and nitrous oxide emissions 3) is more efficient than other waste-to-value methods.
You’ll find case studies to help explain the applications from existing projects here.
Our detailed technology briefing paper contains more technical information here, including how clean, pure syngas is produced by taking raw syngas and applying hot or cold gas conditioning through the synthesis gas purification part of our process.
Our model is part of a diverse ecosystem, supporting a large-scale and reliable renewable energy sector. We contribute to solving the increasingly volumes of waste produced, as our process creates sustainable electricity, biofuels, hydrogen and more.
Once investment for a project has been secured, we work in close collaboration with the owners and operators of plants (these roles can be separate or combined), developers, Engineering Managers, Delivery Managers, contractors and sub-contractors, maintenance parties and other stakeholders, to deliver the end gasification plants and projects.
For more information about our Partners and how we work with them, visit EQTEC Partners.
We are committed to commissioning and taking to live operations in 2022 the first two of our Market Development Centres (MDCs): Italia MDC in Italy and Belišće MDC in Croatia. They are both targeting Commercial Operations Dates (COD) in H2 2022 and we expect them to be commissioned at approximately the same time. We will continue to keep investors and the broader market updated on progress with both.
Contaminated plastic includes polyethylene (PE) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) packaging for engine oil, transmission oil, halogen-free agricultural products or phthalates or any other potentially toxic chemicals. The molecules of such chemicals can adhere or even embed themselves into the plastic of the packaging.
Because such adherence or embedding can reverse when the plastic packaging is reheated, thus releasing chemicals to mix freely with the plastic itself, recycling of such plastic waste is not possible. To date, the only two solutions for managing such waste have been destruction of both plastic and content chemicals by incineration, or storage of the contaminated plastic in landfill. Neither of these solutions is desirable, given the potential for contamination of the ecosystem. Moreover, the risk of contaminated plastics’ finding their way into recycling or non-hazardous waste streams creates a significant challenge for waste management. Gasification is a safe and cleaner process to create value from this waste than other legacy methods including incineration and landfill.
EQTEC does not require ‘operational status’ of plants to earn revenue. We earn revenue at or before financial close through sale of the project SPV (special purpose vehicle) and payment for development services. We also earn revenues between financial close and project completion (plant commissioning) from technology sales and services – our largest source of revenue. We also earn revenue during operations of the plant from maintenance services and in future, will earn revenues from other, value-added services. Our business earns a relatively small proportion of its revenues from operation of live plants, as we will own only a small number of Market Development Centres (MDCs) to showcase our technologies.
The question of project development and execution is core to our business. Our long-term strategic intent is to transition to a technology licensor and innovator, whereby execution of projects would be led by expert partners around the world that specialise in project development, construction and project execution. At that stage of our development, we would benefit from project completion undertaken by companies far more expert than us, allowing us to focus on development and evolution of advanced gasification technologies.
Ultimately, the best way to speed up completion of projects is to engage expert partners, get them up to speed with EQTEC technology and let them do what they do best. We have partnered with Wood, appointed Black & Veatch, continue work with CosMi and other expert delivery partners with this in mind, and we intend to announce more, well-known delivery partners in 2022. Additionally, in 2021 we appointed several veteran, infrastructure project development managers to support execution excellence.
EQTEC applies a pipeline management framework with stages and gates across three broad, phases of work: Project Development, Construction & Commissioning and Operations & Maintenance. The front-end of the Project Development phase is referred to as ‘Gate 0,’ where we take a decision on whether one of the several dozen opportunities in our pipeline – including new opportunities coming in weekly – should be advanced into qualification. A ‘go’ decision results in assignment of a business development manager to spend time, effort and a small amount of investment on engaging the source of the opportunity (e.g., a developer, an owner-operator, a public sector body), building a stakeholder map for it, defining a summary financial model for it and advising the business development team on whether further investment and a dedicated team should be applied to the opportunity, taking it into full project development. If it passes this ‘Gate 1’ then the project becomes a formal development project that the Company intends to pursue through to SPV sale and/ or financial close.
We currently have patents granted for the technology and process parts of our sustainable waste-to-energy business.
We continually review both the scope and geographic applicability of all EQTEC IP and adjust accordingly. In addition, we are proud to possess a wide ranging level and breadth of proprietary know-how that drives our proven operational capabilities and excellence.
You can find out more about our technology in a briefing paper that contains more technical information here.
Our history with gasification has resulted in six successful commercial and two R&D gasification plants – all between 1 MWe and 6 MWe in Spain, Italy, France Croatia and Bulgaria, with others underway in the USA, Greece and the UK. Our longest-running facility (in Spain) has already delivered in excess of 125,000 operational hours, without any unscheduled down-time.
To date, we have no live operational experience in the UK, however we currently have three proposed projects that are progressing in various stages.
To support our UK-focused efforts, we have a dedicated, UK & Ireland business development lead with a long career in development of energy-from-waste facilities in the United Kingdom. Additionally, we have a range of UK-based (and other) investors and funding sources arranged, along with development and delivery partners for success. You can read more about our case studies and upcoming projects here.
Hydrogen is a great, long-term bet with questionable, near-term demand from primarily industrial applications. SNG is a great, fossil-fuel replacement for energy but has potentially higher production costs and so needs a solid business model and strong offtake customers. Biofuels also involve high production costs due to the large volume of feedstock required to produce useful amounts, as well as to the gas-to-liquids technology required for their production. Any government economic support that addresses inefficiencies in the business models by incentivising innovation are welcome. EQTEC has already addressed some of these inefficiencies through our technology or through commercial modelling, and all of these remain attractive alternatives in the right set of circumstances. We will continue to test these business models and refine our portfolio as we learn which are the most attractive for growth.
We have extensively tested our Advanced Gasification Technology on nearly 60 types of feedstocks – either in laboratory conditions, in pilot plants, or at commercial scale, including:
- 12 different species of forestry wood
- Wood chips, wood pellets, demolition wood and waste from the furniture industry
- Industrial waste, including tyres, plastics, and treatment plant sludge – individually and in combination
- Further types of plant waste, including almond and coconut shells, sugar cane bagasse, grape marc and mushroom compost
- Further types of agricultural waste, including straw pellets, corn, cereals and energy crop mixes
- Varying compositions of municipal solid waste
- Animal meal
- Manure
The critical difference is that EQTEC is the main commercial and technical operator of an MDC and as such has full access to use it for commercial and technology development purposes. In some MDCs the Company may have a minority equity interest, but primarily seeks external investors with a strategic interest in the market or application. EQTEC does not intend to own the plants that deploy its technologies. Because EQTEC is a technology provider (and not in general an owner-operator), it intends to supply its technologies to projects and plants developed and built by others.
The purpose of a MDC is to showcase EQTEC’s technology in a live, commercial environment and to do a certain amount of training and development and potentially, R&D. Because EQTEC operates each MDC, it can provide access to prospective customers as and when it wishes, whereas with other plants, it would need to make special provisions with the owner for such access (which the owner could choose not to give).