New to the AD/biogas industry, Ross Mingotti could have been forgiven for walking away from a plant that had already had major mixing issues in its final storage tank.
Within two months of him joining the business in December 2021, one of the paddle mixers in the secondary tank failed.
The mixers had worked well since being commissioned in 2017 at AMPGREEN ESTATES’ Greengill Farm AD Plant (near Penrith, Cumbria, in the far north of England), but now came the problem of retrieving them.
This wasn’t possible without emptying the tank; in this case from the final storage tank, which holds close to 3 million gallons of digestate.
“The final storage tank had already been offline for 12 months,” said Ross. “However, at least we were still able to run our primary digester, which is the outer ring of the site’s tank-within-a-tank design.”
Jamie Seggie, appointed as AD plant manager in February 2022, must have also wondered what he’d walked in to – and then to make matters even worse, the invasion of Ukraine shortly afterwards created a delay in the replacement mixers that had been ordered.
As a 2.4MwH plant, supplying power...
Enhanced mixing and true back-up as AD plant makes important new upgrade
