Explore with @jaws, see his account here (Report - - ARBRE Biomass Facility - Eggborough (July 2020) | Industrial Sites)
History:
The ARBRE Biomass Facility, which is essentially a biomass power plant, was a project started by Kelda (the holding company of Yorkshire Water) in 2000 they sold their green energy division in 2000 and then subsequently sold the ARBRE plant to Energy Power Resources Ltd in around May 2002. It was believed that they would continue to financially support the plant for as long as it was considered economically viable.
The plant, designed to burn coppice willow, had only been producing electricity for only 8 days on 2 August 2002 when it was announced that the firm owning it had become insolvent, due to Kelda reneging on their offer of ongoing financial support only a couple of months after it was agreed.
Ultimately nothing was successful and the closure resulted in around 24 job losses. 35 farmers, who had signed 16 year contracts to supply the plant with wood, were also out of pocket, with acres of coppice they were not able to sell. £13m of investment from the UK Government and EU had gone to waste due to these events.
In May 2003, the site was sold by the receivers, PwC, to an American firm based in New Hampshire, Biodevelopment International, for £3m. This company suggested that they might dismantle and ship the large parts of the factory abroad to be reconstructed. However it seems this was not the case from walking round the site - I couldn't comment on it now but I believe the biomass facility is in the same state as it was 5 years ago. Based on various news articles and Google Earth satellite imagery, it appears that Hargreaves Services took over the site somewhere between 2007 and 2013 as a hub for their haulage business.
The site was vacated by Hargreaves sometime between August 2016 and July 2017, and since then it has laid empty.
Explore:
This one was found by JAWS and I don't think has been documented since his report back in 2020. I managed to access an old hard drive with about 2TB of pics and decided to take a trip down memory lane and get these images edited and posted. From what I remember on the day, we accessed the site off a main road about 100m away from the site and scuttled around to avoid the motion detector cameras. I remember being very on edge at the time (don't think I'd be arsed nowadays) but we looked in all the out buildings prior to accessing the main "biomass" building. Going on the roof is what got us caught. We must have spent another 30 mins walking about before spotting a copper in the car park. We then made the decision to speak to him instead of trying to leave without being spotted. Most coppers I've bumped into have been sound but this guy wasn't in the best of moods. Doubt a lot goes on in Eggborough and we'd interrupted his busy schedule lol
Thanks for having a look,
SB
History:
The ARBRE Biomass Facility, which is essentially a biomass power plant, was a project started by Kelda (the holding company of Yorkshire Water) in 2000 they sold their green energy division in 2000 and then subsequently sold the ARBRE plant to Energy Power Resources Ltd in around May 2002. It was believed that they would continue to financially support the plant for as long as it was considered economically viable.
The plant, designed to burn coppice willow, had only been producing electricity for only 8 days on 2 August 2002 when it was announced that the firm owning it had become insolvent, due to Kelda reneging on their offer of ongoing financial support only a couple of months after it was agreed.
Ultimately nothing was successful and the closure resulted in around 24 job losses. 35 farmers, who had signed 16 year contracts to supply the plant with wood, were also out of pocket, with acres of coppice they were not able to sell. £13m of investment from the UK Government and EU had gone to waste due to these events.
In May 2003, the site was sold by the receivers, PwC, to an American firm based in New Hampshire, Biodevelopment International, for £3m. This company suggested that they might dismantle and ship the large parts of the factory abroad to be reconstructed. However it seems this was not the case from walking round the site - I couldn't comment on it now but I believe the biomass facility is in the same state as it was 5 years ago. Based on various news articles and Google Earth satellite imagery, it appears that Hargreaves Services took over the site somewhere between 2007 and 2013 as a hub for their haulage business.
The site was vacated by Hargreaves sometime between August 2016 and July 2017, and since then it has laid empty.
Explore:
This one was found by JAWS and I don't think has been documented since his report back in 2020. I managed to access an old hard drive with about 2TB of pics and decided to take a trip down memory lane and get these images edited and posted. From what I remember on the day, we accessed the site off a main road about 100m away from the site and scuttled around to avoid the motion detector cameras. I remember being very on edge at the time (don't think I'd be arsed nowadays) but we looked in all the out buildings prior to accessing the main "biomass" building. Going on the roof is what got us caught. We must have spent another 30 mins walking about before spotting a copper in the car park. We then made the decision to speak to him instead of trying to leave without being spotted. Most coppers I've bumped into have been sound but this guy wasn't in the best of moods. Doubt a lot goes on in Eggborough and we'd interrupted his busy schedule lol
SB
