Vivergo Fuels has signed exclusive contracts with grain marketing business Frontier to procure wheat for its feedstock and with animal feeds supplier KW Trident to market the resulting co-products.

Vivergo Fuels is a joint venture company, created by BP, British Sugar and DuPont to build a large-scale wheat-to-bioethanol plant at Saltend, Hull.

Once up and running in 2010, the biorefinery will produce up to 420m litres of bioethanol a year, and will need about 1m tonnes of wheat. This will be supplied under contract by UK growers.

As well as the bioethanol, the process will produce 500,000t of high-protein animal feed as a co-product. This will be available to UK livestock farmers in a range of formulations including dry pellets, moist meal or liquid solubles.

Construction of the Vivergo Fuels plant started in September 2008 and is scheduled to start commercial production in 2010.