12 June 2007

Brunner Mond has announced that it is to invest £10 million in constructing a new sodium bicarbonate manufacturing facility at its Northwich East site in Cheshire. The new plant will have a capacity of 50,000 tonnes a year, and is due to be commissioned in the first half of 2009.

The investment will allow Brunner Mond to meet the growing demand for its range of Briskarb® flue gas treatment products. Briskarb® is a proven, effective and versatile reagent that cost-effectively ensures compliance with the ever-tightening emissions limits for acid gases. The expanding list of customers for Briskarb® covers a range of industrial processes including waste to energy plants, bio-mass power plants, thermal treatment plants for clinical waste, glass furnaces and metal smelters.

Sodium Bicarbonate Business Director, John Melia, said: “Briskarb® is increasingly becoming the reagent of choice for flue gas treatment. It has greater reactivity than alternative reagents such as lime and, importantly, it generates lower levels of residual waste.

“Our plans for Briskarb® have met with an enthusiastic response from the marketplace and we are confident that this new facility will allow us to become a major participant in the development of more efficient and effective emissions-control solutions.

“We are already offering high levels of technical support. For example, we have worked with our partner Braby to develop a mobile dosing rig that can be installed on site to allow potential customers to trial Briskarb® in real conditions.

“The new production capacity will allow us to roll out this service and help our customers to meet and surpass the increasingly stringent standards for acid gas emissions.”

The Northwich East plant will also produce Alkakarb®, Brunner Mond’s established product for the animal feedstuffs sector, sold extensively for use in poultry and livestock feed materials.

The Cheshire sodium bicarbonate investment comes hard on the heels of the development of a similar £10m, 50,000 tonnes per year facility at the company’s site at Delfzijl, in The Netherlands. This plant was recently commissioned and will produce the highest quality sodium bicarbonate available in the marketplace for customers in the pharmaceutical and food industries. With its existing plant in Northwich and the addition of the new facility, Brunner Mond will have three sodium bicarbonate plants in Europe with a combined capacity of 180,000 tonnes per year.

For further information contact Mark Chitty at Brunner Mond on 01606 724000 or Linda Isted/Alison Hardy at Staniforth\ on 0161 919 8495.

Brunner Mond is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of soda ash, sodium bicarbonate and associated alkaline products. The Company has manufacturing plants in Northwich, Cheshire, where it has its headquarters; in Delfzijl, The Netherlands; and at Lake Magadi in Kenya. The Company also operates a transportation terminal at Durban, South Africa. The Company is wholly owned by Tata Chemicals Limited, part of the Tata Group of India.