An award-winning North Yorkshire waste-to-energy organisation has been given the go-ahead to produce a small, but revolutionary, power station, which could change recycling attitudes throughout the world and generate £50 million for the company over the next five years.

Bioflame, of Pickering, has signed a £1.2 million contract with Yorkshire Forward to refine its invention - a super-efficient steam turbine generator, which will turn biomass and green waste into enough electricity to light up to 100 homes.

The regional development agency will pick up half the tab, and the first demo machine could be up and running by next January.

Just lately, Bioflame, which won last month's York Venturefest business award, has been attracting millions of pounds-worth of offers from would-be investors from all over Britain, but its chief executive, Victor Buchanan, is determined to maintain equity.

He believes that once the half-megawatt machine's value is proved to supermarkets, farms, factories - any organisation which produces regular waste - he can form joint venture partnerships to set up the mini power units all over Britain.

Mr Buchanan said: The ongoing ones will be much larger, perhaps 1.5 megawatts, costing up to £2.5 million each. Apart from selling perhaps ten of them, there would be the further revenue of between £300,000 and £400,000 per year in electricity sales."

One money-spinning by-product of the machine is a kind of burned wood, which can be reused with coal to fire up major power stations, and save them massive import costs on pine kernel shells and olive pips.

Mr Buchanan said: "Power stations are under big pressure to increase biomass, and we can help because we can turn wood into coal without compressing it in the ground for 200 million years.

"Shipping dry wood into Britain at £90 per tonne for the purpose is environmental nonsense when they could use our wood which would otherwise have ended up in waste fill sites."

The idea for a superefficient, waste-powered generator was a natural progression from Bioflame's achievements in revolutionising the coffee mills of central America with its SGB Burners.

With their computer-controlled steam powered heat systems, coffee beans dry as evenly as they would do in the sun but on a mass scale, and far more efficiently than previous Victorian burners used by the mill owners.

The effect has been that where the commodity price is normally $72 per bag, mills with the 18 Bioflame burners so far sold are fetching $125. "It has turned around entire local economies in places like Costa Rica," said Mr Buchanan.

Updated: 09:59 Thursday, March 03, 2005