Mortimer Technology wins Queens Award for Enterprise in Innovation

The Mortimer Technology group of Thatcham, Berkshire, with its Torftech subsidiaries in the UK and Canada, was the proud recipient of a Queens Award for Enterprise in the Innovation category for 2010. The innovations that won the award were all based on a novel method of processing solids in gas streams invented by Chris Dodson and marketed under the trade name TORBED Energy Technologies. These are patented techniques for use in energy generation, mineral, chemical, petroleum and environmental process industries. More than 150 plants have now been installed internationally. These technologies have done for sections of the process industries what Sir James Dyson has done with the vacuum cleaner – revolutionised them!

Martin Groszek, Group Managing Director of Mortimer Technology, commented “We were delighted to have been selected to receive the Queens Award – as a small team we have worked hard to anticipate the new emerging biomass and waste to energy markets and to develop appropriate technologies to meet what we anticipated to be rapidly growing demands. Our technologies are now ideally positioned to gain markets worth in excess of £700m for the applications that we have listed here.”

Mortimer Technology has been given the award specifically for developing:

• a new 'torrefaction' process for the conversion of biomass into a 'biocoal' in minutes (instead of 60m years!) which gives a 92% reduction in CO2 emissions against conventional pulverised coal as a fuel.
• a novel modular biomass gasification conversion unit for industrial and commercial scale heat and power plant which in Poland, for example, can reduce emissions by 22m tonnes CO2 annually with a 20% market penetration in their heating stations.
• a novel process for turning paper ‘sludge’ from paper recycling mills (1 tonne sludge for every tonne of paper processed) into steam energy for the paper mill and a valuable mineral feed for the cement industry.
• a new combustion process for rice husks to provide energy and a valuable amorphous silica as a cement displacement.