A FORMER North-East firefighter could be in line to make a fortune with a process to turn old tyres into diesel oil.

Paul Archer, 52, originally from Durham City and who served with the county's brigade at Darlington, and his two business partners are applying to patent the system.

They have set up a company, UTD Research Ltd, and built a working prototype that could process up to two million old tyres a year at their plant near Wrexham, North Wales.

Their invention means that the environment can be spared the harmful effects of millions of tons of old tyres being tipped into landfill sites, and increasingly scarce fossil fuels can be eked out with the oil recovered from them.

In a recent televised test, reclaimed oil from UTD's process was mixed with fuel-station diesel to power a standard family saloon car. With no modifications at all, the car performed normally.

"The EU ban on dumping old tyres in landfill sites, coupled with the recent hike in crude oil prices, means that our process is economically viable," said Mr Archer, who studied business administration at Durham University after leaving the brigade. He now lives in Leicestershire.

"The beauty of our business model is that we get paid at both ends. The companies that take away old tyres are no longer allowed to dump them, so they pay us to take them off their hands.

"Then, when we've done the processing, we can sell the steel, carbon black and oil that we recover."

The company is now looking for investors and hopes to be able to license its process in other countries. UTD's process is called Continuous Reductive Distillation and involves breaking up old tyres into fist-sized chunks and loading them into a machine that looks like an industrial-scale tumble-drier.

They are heated in a sealed, oxygen-deprived atmosphere until the volatile constituents separate from the carbon and steel solids.

Some of the gases given off are recycled to power the heating process, but most are condensed into oil. Steel, carbon black and oil emerge from the other end - all valuable commodities that can be sold.