SALTEND, England — Jordan Spamer and Stacey Monkman live five minutes from the Vivergo Fuels bioethanol plant in Saltend, an estuary town on Yorkshire’s Humber river.
For the past four years, they’ve worked in the firm’s logistics team — tucked away, as they put it, in “a little cabin” on site, “just getting really excited about trucks.”
Normally, the team sees up to 140 lorries a day moving wheat and fuel in and out of the site. But last Friday, the final wheat delivery came and went.
Vivergo’s plant is now at risk of closure due to the U.K.-U.S. trade deal, which allows 1.4 billion liters of tariff-free American ethanol into the British market. It’s a volume Vivergo’s managing director Ben Hackett says is equivalent to the entire U.K. bioethanol market.
