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Original source: Energy Live News
This video from Energy Live News covered a lot of ground. Streamed.News selected 8 key moments and summarises them here. Everything below links directly to the timestamp in the original video.
Grangemouth's closure left thousands of workers and decades of industrial infrastructure without a future. Project Willow is the most concrete attempt yet to answer what comes next — and Celtic Renewables is one of the nine technologies being asked to prove it can work.
Celtic Renewables to Scale Up Tenfold at Grangemouth Under Project Willow
Celtic Renewables is among nine technologies selected by the UK and Scottish governments for Project Willow, a plan published in mid-March to convert the shuttered Grangemouth petrochemical refinery into a low-carbon manufacturing complex. Mark Simmons, speaking for the company, confirmed plans to expand their existing plant by a factor of ten to fifteen, repurposing existing land, utilities, and infrastructure — and noting that nearly 30% of their current workforce already comes from petrochemical backgrounds.
What this reveals is that the just transition, so often articulated as policy aspiration, has a structural test case in Grangemouth. The ability to redeploy both the physical capital and the human skills of a closing fossil-fuel site into biochemical, hydrogen, and sustainable aviation fuel production will determine whether Scotland and the UK can offer a credible industrial model — rather than merely a rhetorical one — for decarbonising heavy industry.
"Scotland and the UK could be a real shining light in terms of how you create that transition from petrochemical assets to low-carbon manufacturing assets."
Celtic Renewables Claims 60% Carbon Saving Now, 100% Target Through Closed-Loop Process
Celtic Renewables currently delivers a 60% reduction in carbon emissions compared to petrochemical equivalents, according to Mark Simmons, and has engineered a process chain designed to close that remaining gap entirely. Waste feedstocks — spanning paper, cardboard, dairy by-products, other drinks-industry residues, and sewage sludge — enter a fermentation process whose effluent then feeds biogas production; hydrogen and food-grade carbon dioxide are captured during fermentation, and water treatment is bolted on at the back end, with the stated goal of generating no net waste.
The underlying issue for the broader biochemicals sector has always been whether the energy and processing costs of biological conversion erode the sustainability case. This integrated value-chain approach, if it reaches the claimed carbon-neutral or carbon-negative threshold, would structurally answer that objection and reframe biological fermentation as a competitive decarbonisation pathway rather than a niche supplement.
"That should get us from 60% where we are now to potentially 100% or even better, where our process becomes a carbon sump or a carbon capture process."
Bio-Based Chemicals at 99.5% Purity Win Customers in Pharma and Cosmetics, Facing 13-Million-Ton Market
The biochemicals produced by Celtic Renewables are chemically identical to their fossil-fuel-derived counterparts, meeting purity thresholds of 99.5 to 99.8%, and are already being purchased by two or three major pharmaceutical companies and a similar number of cosmetics businesses, Simmons confirmed. Current output runs to hundreds of tons annually from the company's first plant — a fraction of the 13-million-ton global annual market for these chemicals, which Simmons described as actively growing.
The fact that major pharmaceutical buyers are accepting biogenic-carbon equivalents at full industrial purity standards is a critical commercial validation: it dissolves the longstanding assumption that bio-based alternatives require either reformulation or regulatory compromise. That precedent, established at small scale, is precisely what makes the scaling argument at Grangemouth and beyond credible to investors and policymakers alike.
"It's the same molecule — it just comes through a different biological pathway."
Biochemicals Sector Positioned as Key Tool for Cutting Hard-to-Reach Scope 3 Supply Chain Emissions
Scope 3 emissions — those embedded in an organisation's supply chain rather than produced directly — represent the most structurally resistant category of corporate carbon reduction, and Simmons argued that bio-based chemical suppliers like Celtic Renewables are uniquely positioned to address them. He cited the NHS as an example of an institution whose pharmaceutical supply chain carries substantial embedded carbon that sustainable chemical ingredients could begin to displace, without requiring any change in end-product formulation or consumer behaviour.
This points to a broader structural opportunity: decarbonising supply-chain inputs allows large institutions to reduce emissions at the ingredient level rather than at the point of consumption, which is politically and practically far easier to achieve. For sectors — healthcare, cosmetics, cleaning products — where asking consumers to change behaviour is neither feasible nor sufficient, upstream biochemical substitution may prove the only scalable lever.
"You can carry on living the way you currently do — and so it's really important that businesses like ours thrive and scale, because that is that sort of positive enabler."
Celtic Renewables Targets 97% Water Recycling, Eyes Caribbean Rum Industry as Circular Economy Partner
Approximately 97% of the output from Celtic Renewables' fermentation process is water, and Simmons outlined plans to recycle that effluent back into the plant's own cleaning operations as production scales. More unusually, the company is exploring a partnership with Caribbean rum producers whose liquid waste is currently discharged into the sea, proposing to extract chemicals from that effluent and then return the treated water to the rum producer's own process — simultaneously addressing both chemical feedstock sourcing and localised water scarcity.
The underlying logic is one of colocation and mutual resource dependency: by positioning a biochemical facility alongside a drinks producer, both the waste stream and the water recovery cycle become shared infrastructure. This model, if replicable, suggests that the circular economy in biochemicals is not merely a processing concept but a spatial and industrial-planning one — with implications for how future facilities are sited internationally.
"You could then co-locate with the rum producer and effectively recycle the water back into their process."
Scottish Whisky By-Product 'Pot Ale' Forms the Base of Celtic Renewables' Biochemical Process
Celtic Renewables was founded on the recognition that Scotland's whisky industry generates large volumes of a nutrient-rich liquid called pot ale — a distillation by-product — which serves as the primary feedstock for the company's fermentation process. That base liquid is supplemented with reject potatoes, specifically the grade C produce deemed unfit for retail or food processing, sourced under a commercial agreement with a wholesale supplier to Tesco, alongside low-grade molasses derived from sugar industry residues.
The feedstock selection is deliberate and structurally significant: by anchoring production to materials that have no viable food use, Celtic Renewables sidesteps the fundamental tension between bioenergy and food security that has undermined the credibility of first-generation biofuels. What this reveals is that the viability of biological chemical production may depend less on novel science than on disciplined sourcing decisions made at the outset.
"Grade A's go to your table, grade B's go into crisps and chips, and we take the grade C's."
Celtic Renewables Plans Larger Plant Within Three Years, Pursues Up to 12 International Opportunities
Celtic Renewables expects to bring a significantly larger production facility into operation within three years, a milestone Simmons identified as the threshold for profitability. In parallel, the company is already developing up to twelve opportunities across Scotland, the wider UK, and international markets, though Simmons was clear that Celtic Renewables intends to position itself primarily as a technology provider rather than an infrastructure builder.
The distinction matters structurally: a technology-licensing model allows the process to scale without the capital constraints of owning and operating each facility, but it also means the company's long-term value depends on the strength of its intellectual property and the willingness of industrial partners to invest in new plants. With oil reserves finite and the global market for these chemicals standing at 13 million tons annually, the scale of the structural opportunity is not in question — what remains critical is whether the financing and policy environment moves fast enough to match it.
"Oil will run out, and so ultimately this needs to grow to be able to enable people to live their lives in the same way."
Celtic Renewables Claims World Leadership in AB Fermentation as Biochemicals Emerge as Global Industry
Simmons described Celtic Renewables as the pioneer and world leader in acetone-butanol (AB) fermentation — a biological process for producing solvents and chemical intermediates — and framed the broader biochemicals sector as a fledgling but rapidly internationalising industry that has only gained serious attention over the past five to ten years. The feedstocks underpinning the process, from drinks industry residues to paper, cardboard, dairy waste, and sewage, are globally distributed, which Simmons argued makes the technology intrinsically transferable across geographies.
This points to a broader structural consideration: first-mover advantage in a process technology is only durable if the intellectual property is protected and the operational expertise cannot be easily replicated. As larger industrial players begin to examine biological fermentation seriously, the competitive position that Celtic Renewables currently holds will face increasing pressure — making the pace of its own scaling, and its licensing strategy, the critical determinants of whether it retains that leadership.
"In terms of the AB fermentation process, we're the pioneer and the world leader in terms of what we do."
Summarised from Energy Live News · 29:28. All credit belongs to the original creators. Energy Live News summarises publicly available video content.
