PONTYPOOL inventor Graham Taylor (pictured) is on the verge of announcing a deal for a bio-gas electricity-generating plant located within Torfaen.

He is waiting to see if the Assembly will award him an area investment grant.

The plant - a pilot project - would use bugs to breakdown food waste from Gwent organisations such as Asda, McDonalds, Torfaen borough council, Gwent NHS Trust and the Celtic Manor.

The bugs would also feed on animal by-products, such as those arising from beef cattle slaughtered under the 30-month rule.

Mr Taylor said: "Through anaerobic digestion, the bugs will produce gas consisting of 70 per cent methane and this will be burned in a generator to create 2.2 mega watts of electricity for the national grid."

He added that his company wants to sign up more Gwent food waste producers and firms in this category should contact him at www.energyworld67@hotmail.com

After a three-month trial of the plant the project would be ready for a rapid expansion across Wales and the UK and Mr Taylor anticipates 300 jobs being created by the end of the first year.

Mr Taylor's company, Energy World, recently brought its bio-diesel (made from recycled vegetable oils) to market.

He has been working on the bio-gas project for three years and now believes it is a process for which the world is not just ready but desperate. "From mid-2005 DEFRA will insist on cooked and uncooked food waste being separated from all other waste.

"Food manufacturers and caterers are already having to pay £17.50 per cubic metre of waste in land fills and it's having to be transported further and further afield to suitable sites.

"The 22 animal renderers in this country are also in a difficult position. From November this year, animal by-products will no longer be able to go back into animal feed.

"In fact the UK has been on two-years' grace: in Europe the practice has been banned for 10 years."

Mr Taylor's first generation plant could be as secure a means of food waste and animal by-product disposal as incineration.

But it depends on hitting a temperature of 850 degrees C for two seconds to destroy 99.9 per cent of all pathogens associated with animal products.

"A normal gas generator doesn't reach this temperature so we will have to extract the gases and re-fire them to hit that benchmark. We have done this on a small scale and now need to replicate it on an industrial-sized plant. At the end of a one-year rapid expansion programme on multiple sites around Wales we could be producing 60 mega watts."

Mr Taylor said "the eyes of the world" would be watching this project and it could become a jewel in the showcase of sustainable energy generation that the Assembly wants for Wales.