I’m delighted to confirm that we have now received the formal licence for water abstraction from the River Derwent. This has been achieved due to the generosity of Celanese at Spondon. They held a substantial licence for abstraction of water for their manufacturing processes. Whilst the demise of the company has been very hard for its many hundreds of Celanese employees we have received a significant boost with the availability of the abstraction rights. The local Celanese directors have signed over the rights to us and we have then modified the volumes to suit our requirements. We are very grateful for this generosity.
I’m sure that it is obvious that to get a new licence has always been a very difficult matter to achieve. Nowadays the value of water courses is fully recognised and anything that might disturb the equilibrium is investigated very carefully. In the first days of the canal agreement had to be reached with Derby mill owners to abstract only when the mills were not working as they wouldn’t risk not having enough water to power the mills.