Quaker Oats to use porridge for power

Everyone knows eating porridge for breakfast is a great way to store up energy for the day ahead. But now Quaker Oats, one of the most famous brands in the breakfast business, will be using its oats to feed its own energy hunger.

Quaker will be using waste oat husks to provide heat and electricity to its Uthrogle Mills plant in Scotland. The £6m combined heat and power biomass generators will create enough stream and electricity for the entire facility, reducing Quaker's CO2 emissions by 9,000 tonnes a year.

The company expects to export 1,300 megawatt hours (mWh) of renewable energy back to the National Grid, which will further accelerate the return on investment (ROI) of the generator.

This attitude to waste -- an admirable one -- kills three birds with one stone. It slashes Quaker's energy costs, it reduces its carbon footprint and it solves the tricky problem of what to do with manufacturing by-products.

Quaker estimates that it will save 172,000 road miles by not having to transport husks away from the site. Heaven knows where they were going before.

This is not the first time the brekkie company has been involved with oat fuel. In 2002 the University of Iowa in the US started adding Quaker's waste oat husks to coal to fire the university's power plant. By 2007, oat hulls generated 10,000mWh of electricity for the institution.

Using by-products of food manufacturing as a fuel source may not be as unusual as it sounds. Cornflakes and toast can also be used in biomass generators (or at least the leftover straw can be, once the wheat has been milled).

In September 2007, the town of Sleaford in Lincolnshire gave the go-ahead for a 40 megawatt straw-fired power station. Brigg has also given the nod to a straw-fired power station which will generate enough electricity for 90,000 homes in North Lincolnshire. In Ely, Cambridgeshire, a 38 megawatt straw-fired plant went live back in 2002.

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