Conversion technologies enable the co-production of advanced biofuels, green power, and other bio-based products from organic wastes and hydrocarbons, taking the world beyond the use of food resources in the production of biofuels, one association points out.
The practice of producing power or fuel through energy-from-waste, or conversion technology processes, is now poised to “really get off of the ground,” notes Kay Martin, vice-president of the BioEnergy Producers Association in California.
Additionally, production of low-cost electricity and ethanol—and butanol or hydrogen in the future—from America’s wastestreams will supplement or replace gasoline, convert vast quantities of waste to energy, and significantly reduce greenhouse gases, communities’ costs of waste disposal, the need for landfills, and the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, the association contends.
“It seems like every other week we get wind of another project that’s going forward,” says Martin, who compiles a monitoring list of biopower and biofuel projects of companies employing non-combustion technologies to convert various types of waste biomass into energy projects.
On that list of projects:
- The Allied Federated Energy Project, a 25-MW power plant planned for construction in Milwaukee, WI. It will utilize an MSW feed and Westinghouse Plasma Corp.’s technology. “Westinghouse has several successful plants operating in Japan and is a major player, so this project should be one to watch,” Martin notes.
- In Vero Beach, FL, INEOS Bio, a large international chemical corporation, is constructing its first plant and plans to put a major investment in US ethanol plants with MSW feedstocks, Martin says.
- Plasco Energy of Ottawa, Canada, has operated a 75-tons-per-day commercial demonstration plant since July 2007 on a 6-acre site near a city-owned and operated landfill. The project is supported by a $9.5 million grant from Sustainable Development Canada. The company has other projects in various stages of planning.
- Cleveland, OH–based Quasar Energy Group broke ground on May 3, 2010, in Columbus, OH, for its fourth facility featuring an anaerobic digester capable of producing a megawatt of electricity. Quasar, which maintains a laboratory and engineering facility at the Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center campus located in Wooster, OH, received funding for the project from Ohio’s Bipartisan Job Stimulus for Advanced Energy, as well as an investment by the Ohio Third Frontier Advanced Energy Program.
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Photo: Enerkem
Enerkem’s Westbury, QC, commercial-scale biofuels demonstration plant |
“With all of these projects in the mill and all of the literally billions of dollars being invested in this industry, it’s about ready to go. This is after following it for more than a decade, so it’s really gratifying to see,” says Martin.
There is now more national policy support than ever, Martin points out. In particular, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) “final rule for the renewable fuel standard has for the first time recognized the biogenic portion of the post-recycled MSW stream as qualifying as renewable biomass for the purpose of meeting the federal mandate for the production of biofuels, and that’s very helpful,” she says.
Also helpful are energy bills in the offing, such as the Waxman-Markey bill that qualifies the biogenic portion of the MSW stream as a feedstock for renewable electricity and under the renewable portfolio standard.
“For the first time, we’re getting MSW recognized as a renewable feedstock,” she says. “Then there are the US Department of Energy (DOE) and United States Department of Agriculture grant funding programs and loan guarantees. It seems like there are never enough, but at least there’s a significant amount of dollars being dedicated specifically to bio-refineries and that’s all a very positive sign.”
But there are some pockets of the country where the trend is lagging behind the rest of the nation. California is a case in point, Martin says.
“We have some rather antiquated provisions and statutes that make it very difficult to permit these facilities in our state,” Martin says. “For this reason, our association has tried to get legislation through over the past five years to remove some of those obstacles. We have several jurisdictions looking at conversion technology, have requests for proposals out and are doing active solicitations for these facilities. I think we’ll get it through this year.”
Every year that passes without some type of action is critical and a source of wasted energy, according to the BioEnergy Producers Association. According to the association, California will place another 35.5 million tons of post-recycled municipal waste in its landfills this year—enough to support the production of 1.6 billion gallons of ethanol and approximately 1,250 MW of power.
Financing projects is the biggest obstacle, Martin says.
“These facilities tend to be very capital intensive on the front end. That’s where the DOE funding comes in and the loan guarantees are very helpful, but we’re starting to get some big players in the mix rather than just having small startups that are trying to demonstrate their technologies.
“Some of the oil companies are beginning to look at this option as well as the large waste management companies, such as Waste Management. They just bought a controlling interest in three of these companies.”
Keeping the lines of communication open with the public is a key factor in getting forward movement for MSW facilities attempting to pursue conversion technology.
“There is a national movement of traditional recycling or ‘zero waste’ folks who are very much opposed to utilizing the solid wastestream for energy production,” Martin points out. “Those folks tend to go out into the communities and try to block projects by alleging that there are toxic air emissions and all of these other fables. You can’t disprove a negative. That’s been a problem.”
Additionally, some anti-incineration groups are “creating fear-mongering campaigns in the public,” Martin notes.
“These folks tend to feel we can actually get to zero waste. They’re talking about no waste in the future with the thought that everything could be recycled or composted. That’s a potential problem. I think that communities are getting much more sophisticated in terms of looking at options that fit local conditions—what types of technologies are compatible with their wastestreams for their geography or their access to markets.”
There are no drawbacks to conversion technologies as long as community leaders exercise due diligence in adopting them for their MSW facilities, Martin says.
“They’re going to have to look to companies that have not only demonstrated their technologies on a bench scale but also on a pilot commercial demonstration scale as well as companies that have adequate financial backing and remove a lot of the risk that’s involved for a municipality,” she says.
For example, Los Angeles County has retained a public relations firm whose sole job is to educate the public about conversion technology, says Martin, a member of the county’s technical committee.
With 10 million residents, Los Angeles County is the most populated in the United States. Although the county recycles 60% of its trash—one of the highest recycling rates in the nation—it still disposes 38,000 tons of trash each day‚ a number expected to increase to nearly 50,000 tons per day by 2020.
Therefore, it’s key to convince the public that there is a solution in waste-to-energy projects, Martin points out.
“There are already 100 of these facilities in other countries, so there’s a good track record to show not only that they work but that the emissions from these facilities are excellent,” says Martin. “There are no problems with dioxins or furans and all of them are operating well within the emissions standards of their countries.”
Plasma Waste Recycling in Huntsville, AL, uses high-temperature plasma (an ionized gas) to convert MSW to syngas, molten metal and vitreous slag.
Gasification differs from incineration in that it utilizes the plasma energy to thermally convert organic waste from a solid or liquid into an energy-rich gas and does not produce any ash.
The byproducts can generate additional revenue. The syngas is used to generate electricity to sell to the power grid; the molten metal is cast as scrap steel and the slag is cast as building material aggregate or spun into mineral wool.
Terry Moore, president and chief executive officer of Plasma Waste Recycling, explains that his company’s plasma-based process doesn’t utilize plasma torches, but, rather, graphite arc plasma.
“It is able to operate without preprocessing or shredding in the waste,” he says. “It’s a continuous process that operates under partial negative pressure and has no residue, no ash, no combustive element in it. In that, it differs from other plasma processes.”
The company recently entered a feasibility study with city officials in Montgomery, AL, to develop a 175,000-tons-per-year (about 500 tons per day) plant.
The feasibility study—expected to be completed by the end of summer—will “ascertain the economics of locating a facility there and arrange for all of the off-take contracts and waste-supply contracts that will complement the waste supply that we get from the city of Montgomery,” says Moore.
“We would expect within two years of completing the feasibility study that we would have a plant operating,” he adds. “We would like to get in under the wire for the shovel-in-ground rebate the US Department of Treasury has available for new plants. We’re hoping they would extend that—I know there are a few bills in both the Senate and the House to try to extend that 2010 deadline, because I don’t think there are many folks taking advantage of that, particularly in waste-to-energy. Maybe the solar and the wind folks did.”
Waste-to-energy projects are time-intensive, Moore points out.
“You’ve got a lot of single points of failure that you have to overcome just to get a project off the ground,” he says.
Moore characterizes the regulatory environment in Alabama as “very open” to new technologies.
“They are anxious to see it operating on an industrial scale and are open-minded about it,” he adds.
Moore acknowledges there are various degrees of acceptance of new technologies in each state.
“California is generally looked upon as the most strict and most difficult,” he says. “The people we’ve met with in California have been very open to new technology and they have programs that allow new technology to be tested. You just have to be careful that what you represent is true and can be demonstrated.
“I think overall nationally we obviously want to see more acceptance of new technologies for waste-to-energy, but my past experience has been that there’s always a certain amount of government coercion that’s necessary to drive these technologies into the marketplace. That’s unfortunate, because we think our technology is economically viable with or without government coercion.”
Moore believes that on the whole, the US is moving in a positive direction with conversion technology.
“There is a place for waste-to-energy,” he says. “I hear a woman say at a conference last summer that we have to think ‘outside the hole’ and I really like that expression. Why put something in the ground that you have to monitor for 50 years when you can use it as a resource? I’m happy to see that as we move down the road that more people are beginning to embrace this. It’s especially true that we see a real acceptance of waste-to-energy offshore.”
His company’s market interests are worldwide, targeting municipalities and developers.
“We do not desire to own or operate the plants; we look for developers and municipalities that want to take a project to fruition,” Moore says. “We provide a turnkey plant, license the technology, and provide continuous monitoring of the system on a yearly basis and update the technology as improvements are made to it.”
Moore believes total recycling is possible.
“That’s one of the advantages of our system,” he says. “We don’t generate an ash or a char. I don’t like to deal in absolutes, so I won’t say there is nothing left over, but if there are some chlorides in the feedstock, for instance, we will scrub those out as sodium chloride.
“Any heavy metals in the system may report to the metal phase or may actually be scrubbed out as an oxide in a wet scrubber we have or captured in a carbon filter that we have as well.”
Moore concedes that one of the roadblocks for energy-from-waste is financial, because of the projects being capital-intensive.
“But it’s what we call lagniappe in the South,” he says, a term akin to something being a “bonus” or a “gift.”
“Cash-flow-wise, we believe our process looks pretty good, given ordinary tipping fees and off-take contracts. Any time you get extra credits and things you can sell, that increases the return to the shareholders. That’s what drives all of these businesses—are they economically viable?”
Mark Montemurro believes they are. He’s the president and chief executive officer of AlterNrg, which has two divisions: the Westinghouse Plasma Corp., which uses plasma gasification to create energy from waste and biomass, and CleanEnergy, which utilizes geoexchange technologies to extract energy from the earth for heating and cooling.
AlterNrg has a range of projects, from those with regulatory approval to ones in the pre-engineering stage in Asia, the United Kingdom, Spain, and North America.
Some are commercial operations; the majority use municipal waste for the production of power either by steam cycle or gas turbine.
The biggest obstacle to energy-from-waste projects is “making the general public understand that viable options for energy production and waste handling exist and can be commercially viable but not free,” Montemurro points out.
“The status quo of landfilling that we are accustomed to is no longer necessary,” he adds. “Waste energy fits very well into integrated recycle programs. It is an effective strategy and is part of the overall solution, but as with any major societal shift, acceptance is challenging.”
That despite its benefits, which include a reduction to actual elimination of landfills, Montemurro adds.
“It thereby does not create a liability for the future, but creates good jobs and reduces the reliance on foreign fossil fuels,” he says.
The drawbacks: “These projects require a lot of capital and require the public’s willingness to support new technology in their own backyard.
“Unless it is driven by the community, the big landfill operations have little incentive to change their practice because it is easiest and most profitable for them to just bury waste,” Montemurro adds. “It requires close collaboration among those in the community, the technology provider, the project developer and the user of the off-take energy.”
Montemurro points out that in North America, “producing energy from waste has the potential to be a significant component in meeting our overall energy needs. Thermal waste energy technologies evolving beyond incineration are still in the early stages and unfortunately there are companies in the industry making claims that are not grounded.
“Layer that with communities’ concerns about air quality and unclear regulatory processes, and the climate for wide adoption of energy-to-waste projects becomes difficult. Though those are significant barriers to material change, companies and governments are supporting the need for change, and we believe that North America—especially in higher population density regions—is ready and open to adopt new technologies.”
Montemurro says that outside of North America, particularly in Asia, where the regulatory process has fewer barriers, other challenges exist, such as intellectual property protection and the complexity of negotiating an unfamiliar culture.
Yet, “the public’s desire to utilize waste in a constructive manner other than just burying it is very positive,” he adds.
At the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio in Grove City, OH, Firmgreen has installed its technology for converting waste to high Btu, specifically as a fuel, making it the only operating waste-to-compressed-natural-gas facility in the United States.
The company is presently under contract for similar facilities in Brazil and Puerto Rico, notes Tony Wong, director of business development for Firmgreen.
In general, the company’s target market is wherever there are biogas opportunities, such as landfills, water treatment plants, and digesters.
Wong is not quite as optimistic as some of his peers in terms of the industry’s direction.
“At this moment, we are going nowhere as a nation,” he says. “Regulations are mostly favoring electricity, which is some use of the waste Btus, but it is really not an effective or efficient use. And financially speaking, waste-to-electricity is marginally profitable mostly due to the tax credits.”
Yet high-Btu is a higher valued use of the biogas; the technology is available and proven and there are enough opportunities, Wong adds.
“We still don't have the CNG or alternative fuel infrastructure, even though much of the 2009 stimulus package was supposed to help with that,” Wong says. “With less than $5 per million Btus for natural gas and relatively low-cost gasoline and diesel, waste-to-fuel projects are not financially viable for developers and investors to pursue.”
Wong notes what he calls a “chicken and egg” syndrome of alternative fuel approaches.
“There is not enough demand and/or infrastructure for CNG, which is the highest-value use for the biomethane,” he says. “Firmgreen, along with companies in our industry, is working both ends—we’re creating and selling the products and services, and we have to create the demand and market for our own products and services. That is a difficult burden when most of the companies in this industry are small. We can’t do it all.”
Wong notes three distinct benefits to his company’s technology. One is financial: “When you consider that $2 for a CNG gasoline gallon equivalent is approximately $17.50 per million Btus and electricity at $0.09 per kilowatt-hour is approximately $5.29 per million Btus,” he points out.
A second benefit is environmental: “Biomethane CNG has the cleanest life cycle of any fuel on earth,” he says. “Shouldn’t we be using this accessible energy source for our school buses, trash trucks, shuttles, taxis, et cetera? Furthermore, this is a cleaner use of the biogas compared to flaring it or putting it into an electrical engine which both put out pollutants.”
A third benefit is domestic security. “Biomethane CNG can help reduce America’s dependence on imported oil,” Wong adds.
And there are drawbacks, he concedes.
“Many opportunities lack a nearby natural gas pipeline to transport the biomethane, or nearby demand for the CNG—thus the situation of stranded biomethane,” Wong says. Additionally, there are no regulations to help waste-to-high-Btu projects and no regulations to force municipalities and biogas owners to incorporate and use alternative fuel vehicles. We need to incentivize building of demand and infrastructure.”
What of those MSW facilities that are ready to embrace the energy-from-waste technology?
“Unfortunately, many sold away their landfill gas rights years ago with long terms of 15 to 20 years,” he says. “If an MSW facility has not, they should first put a collection system in place and, second, review the financial benefits of a waste-to-energy project, more specifically a waste-to-high-BTU pipeline or fuel.”
Ze-Gen uses gasification technology to create syngas (synthesis gas), a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas. Syngas can replace fossil fuels in conventional combined heat and power units and power generation systems.
A high-temperature liquid metal converts waste material into syngas through a thermo-chemical reduction process. Syngas is 50% the density of natural gas and can be used as a fuel source in the same way as natural gas. It can be used to generate renewable electricity, processed into green diesel, refine crude oil, or be a catalyst for thermal ethanol generation.
“If natural gas prices keep declining, interest in switching from fossil fuels over to energy derived from waste is less of an imperative than when the energy prices are high,” says Bill Davis, chief executive officer of Ze-Gen. “That bodes poorly for expansion of existing waste-energy franchises—meaning building new incineration plants—but it bodes even worse for new technologies.”
The regulatory environment with respect to energy-from-waste is slowly but steadily becoming more favorable, and that depends on geography, Davis says.
“On a federal level, it’s getting better, such as the Waxman-Markey provisions for inclusion in the various federal renewable energy programs for energy that comes from waste,” he says.
“Some states are fairly progressive,” Davis says, adding that’s not the case in his state.
“I live in Massachusetts, where things are going in the wrong direction in the sense that the environment has gotten tougher around this issue,” he says. “Massachusetts has a moratorium on new incineration plants that was just upheld despite efforts to change those regulations. I suspect they’re not going to change any time soon.”
Yet Davis believes “there is an increasing recognition that there is a difference between gasification and incineration and that gasification is preferential from an energy recovery standpoint, as well as a perceived environmental standpoint.”
More people are embracing gasification technology, Davis says.
“It’s important to think of this as a global and not just a United States matter,” he points out. “In Europe, there are a lot of incentives which are specific and explicit in encouraging gasification. In the United States, we seem to be 10 years behind Europe when it comes to waste policy.”
Like others in the industry, Davis points to an “environmental lobby” that discourages incineration and especially renewable energy credits for incineration.
“They don’t want new technologies, because they really don’t understand how they’re different from incineration. And they don’t want land-filling. In an unintended way, what we’re left with is land-filling, because there aren’t any other options. They’ve created a scene where there is no other option for material to go.”
One of the challenges in addressing that is “inherent in that there are some new technologies that aren’t that different from incineration—they’re really staged incineration,” Davis contends.
“I think with all of that complexity and on top of that a financing environment which has all but collapsed, it makes it difficult to move some of these things. Another major problem is the price of fossil fuel,” says Davis, adding that price fluctuations affect tipping fees and revenues, making it more difficult to finance any projects.
Additionally, there is not much financial risk being taken on new technologies, Davis points out.
“We’ve seen this cycle before,” he says. “What’s different this time is that the technologies that seek to gain a foothold are actually much farther along from a technology standpoint and are in the early stages of being ready for commercialization, but they still don’t have an opportunity to move forward because of the confluence of those forces, whereas when we last saw this cycle 15 years ago, the technologies really weren’t ready.”
That includes his own company, which has moved through a “complicated process getting from having a technology to commercial viability,” Davis says.
“Our strategy has been to move deliberately and thoughtfully but to not really seek to take risk in terms of expanding too quickly,” he says.
Ze-Gen has a pilot facility in New Bedford, MA, and has recently announced plans for its first commercial plant, scheduled to be built next year.
“Our market area is anywhere where there is a confluence of an ample supply of non-MSW post-recycled waste material and small facilities looking for syngas as a replacement for fossil fuels in an engine or a boiler or looking for higher value applications of syngas.”
Scott Hughes, chief operating officer for Visiam, agrees with others in the industry that while the energy-from-waste business is poised to move forward, various government entities in the United States are “dramatically behind” in availing themselves of the technology.
Hughes also believes financing challenges play a major role.
“You can’t get bank financing and equity financing and that definitely plays a part of it,” he says.
Financing notwithstanding, public perception with respect to incineration presents another challenge.
“The people within the political system who control what’s going to happen within their communities are so afraid and they pass it off to the engineer who passes it off. They are so afraid to make a wrong decision that it means no decision is better than the wrong decision,” says Hughes.
To address those challenges, Visiam is working with strategic partners who already have the trust of decision makers, such as engineering firms, Hughes says.
“We’re working with them to introduce the technology from a strategic standpoint and an engineering standpoint,” he says. Demonstrating that the technology makes sense for the United States is another way the company is working to meet that challenge.
Visiam’s process has four components: A rotary thermal vessel “cooks” the MSW; a materials recovery facility is used to separate ‘clean’ recyclables from biomass; a digestion system composts the biomass into methane; and generation uses methane as fuel to deliver electricity.
Visiam’s anaerobic digestion-based technology is geared toward communities of 30,000 to 100,000, says Hughes.
The company is presently permitting a project in Minnesota, working on some other government projects and is reaching out overseas.
“It’s really been in the past two years that people have started focusing more on different projects from the energy-from-waste standpoint as more and more landfills have started to close down,” says Hughes. “People aren’t permitting them anymore and now you’re seeing more acceptance of the fact that we need to come up with an alternative solution.”
It’s a long learning curve to get people from acceptance to the idea to adoption of it.
“When you’re talking anaerobic digestion, people say, ‘You’ll just have this big open, smelly thing’. No, that’s compost,” Hughes points out.
Visiam does not own or operate systems, Hughes says.
“We don’t want to because it’s so regional,” he says. “Instead, I will sell technology to part of the value chain that makes the most sense. One of the biggest mistakes people are making is coming into a community and saying, ‘I know you have this vertical waste management system and there are all sorts of people who try to extract value out of this, but we’re going to come in and tell you how to do it better, and we’re going to own it, and trust me we’ll all make money and it will be a beautiful thing.’
“Now you have to do a lot more education and a lot more controlling and it takes a lot longer instead of coming in and looking for the value chain’s marketplace and working with key players within that value chain to maximize their results.”
In addition to landfills closing and no new ones being permitted, municipalities will have to buy new trucks that operate on liquefied natural gas and compressed natural gas, Hughes points out.
“This technology is going to stand on its own, it’s financially viable on its own, it’s going to succeed, and if not, we’ll find a way to make it financially viable,” Hughes says. “What’s needed is the enforcement of the rules, statutes and policies that are put in place in order for the technologies to come out and compete on an even field.”
Looking forward, Hughes sees this as “an exciting time” in the industry.
“There are some good things abounding,” he says. “It’s going to be interesting to see how it all shakes out at the end of the day. It’s not about who comes out on top. There is 140 million tons of trash still going into landfills, so there’s a lot of room for all of us.”
Enerkem develops, owns and operates waste-to-fuels plants with new projects under development throughout North America. The company transforms sorted MSW and forest and agricultural residues into second generation ethanol, other advanced biofuels and chemicals through a thermochemical technology.
The autothermal green gasification and catalytic synthesis occurs in four steps:
- Pretreatment, in which the feedstock is sorted, recycled, dried and shredded.
- Gasification, during which the waste materials that contain carbon are converted to synthetic gas in a 10-second process.
- Cleaning and sequentially conditioning of the synthetic gas for use with existing and known catalysts.
- Conversion to liquid fuel, when the synthetic gas is passed over proven catalysts which rearrange the molecules in the gas into ethanol.
Another benefit of the process is that it uses little water, and that which is used is done so in a closed circuit. Certain feedstocks, including MSW, can be used to produce drinking-quality water through the process that can either be integrated into the local water system or used as potable level water, says Marie-Hélène Labrie, vice president for government affairs and communications for Enerkem.
Enerkem’s technology operates under less severe parameters (temperatures of approximately 700°C and pressures below 10 atm) than high-severity oxygen gasifiers.
Enerkem’s pilot project in Sherbrooke, QC, has run for more than 3,600 hours as a research facility since 2003, producing syngas, methanol, second-generation ethanol, steam, power, and acetates from 20 various feedstocks that have been used to test and validate the technology.
In Westbury, QC, Enerkem has its first commercial-scale demonstration biofuels plant that is also be the world’s first ethanol plant to use negative-cost and unconventional materials—treated wood from used electricity poles.
“We are located in front of a sawmill that recycles the metal part and the exterior is our feedstock, the remaining part that has the treated wood,” says Labrie.
The plant is operated by a team of 13 people and will, at term, produce 1.3 million gallons of second-generation ethanol annually. The conditioned synthesis gas island is in production and production of methanol and ethanol is to commence during 2010.
In Edmonton, AB, Enerkem Greenfield Alberta Biofuels entered into a 25-year agreement with the city of Edmonton to build and operate a plant that will produce and sell next generation biofuels—including methanol and cellulosic ethanol—from sorted MSW.
Edmonton will supply 100,000 tons of sorted MSW per year, the portion remaining after recycling and composting that would otherwise be landfilled. Construction began this year and will initially produce 10 million gallons of biofuel a year.
In the United States, a plant is planned for the Three Rivers Landfill site in Pontotoc, MS, where 380,000 tons of feedstock—including 200,000 tons of MSW—will be converted to 20 million gallons of ethanol each year. Enerkem is expected to recycle and convert 60% of the MSW brought to the Three Rivers landfill site.
Enerkem is now working on the environmental permitting process and the company hopes to have the facility in operation early next year, says Labrie.
While Canada has been somewhat behind the United States with respect to a regulatory environment supporting waste-to-biofuel technologies and both behind Europe as such, Labrie sees that changing.
“In the US, there is a suite of federal policies that support the production of second-generation biofuels that recognize municipal solid waste as a renewable biomass for the production of biofuels, given that second-generation biofuels are really viewed as capable of making a material impact on reducing energy dependence on foreign oil and also on reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Labrie notes.
“In Canada, we are starting on the federal side with a renewable fuel standard that will come into effect in September,” she adds. “At the provincial level, there are different regulations and legislation, so I think we have very similar suite of federal policies with some operating incentives and with some grants as well. We may be a little bit behind on some federal policies to support renewable fuels, but we definitely have similar programs.”
Labrie agrees with others in the industry that the biggest obstacle for these precommercial technologies is access to capital to commercialize the technologies, with recent financial crises making capital to fund the newly emerging technologies scarce.
Educating the public is a key factor in promoting the idea that “what these technologies are doing is they’re really transforming two sectors: the waste sector and the transportation fuel sector, by changing the way we use our nonrecyclable garbage in producing a fuel that can at the same time reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I only see positive things that this can bring to communities,” says Labrie.
“In general, thinking about having garbage fuel your car is really compelling,” she adds. “But of course, people want to know how you do this.”
For MSW operations that desire to incorporate the technologies into their operations, Enerkem builds the plant.
“We don’t license our technologies,” Labrie says. “It’s turnkey. We operate the facility and view the relationship with the municipal solid waste operation as a partnership.”
Feedstock supply and separation are two elements critical in the partnership, she says.
“There is a feedstock supply agreement. There has to be a certain degree of volume to build a business case, and in our case we have the flexibility also to use other feedstock, such as forestry residue and agriculture residue,” Labrie says.
“Another key element is feedstock separation. We need certain specifications in terms of shredding and preparing the feedstock and who will be responsible for that, such as the materials recovery facility, and any additional things to be done.”
Yukon, PA–based A.R.C. Technologies Corp. has a plant at Waste Management’s South Hills landfill in South Park, PA, utilizing a proprietary gas separation system that is providing natural gas in the Pittsburgh area.
A.R.C. uses pressure swing adsorption (PSA) technology, which company chief executive officer Stan Siegel describes as a one-step process which removes the carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen from the landfill gas and takes what essentially amounts to 99% methane to pipe it—in this case, throughout the southern region of Pittsburgh.
Siegel founded his company in 1978 as A.R.C. Electric Co., which grew into a manufacturing firm for control systems and system design. These services are provided to such industries as renewable energy, steel, powdered metals, nuclear, water treatment, foundry, utilities, petrochemical, and product manufacturers.
Five years ago, Siegel set his sights on the renewable energy market and began directing some of this company’s efforts there. In the ensuing years, A.R.C. Technologies has developed processing plants and integrated control systems that convert landfill, gob, or coal mine gas into pipeline-quality natural gas. Two years ago, the company commissioned a plant at the South Hills location, which it owns and operates.
The effort came on the heels of the company’s construction of two membrane plants commissioned in 2004.
“We saw the shortcomings of the membranes in regards to handling air infiltration into gas-collection systems,” says Siegel.
Siegel’s company has an operation and maintenance location in Yukon, where it can monitor plants, start/stop operations, and provide cell phone support for the alarms and statuses sent via text message from the plants.
“That means if we have a landfill in Illinois or California, we would need support people at the site, but most of the plant operations could be done right from your car,” he says.
Siegel says his company’s largest challenge at this point is convincing the EPA to consider total recovery.
“We have to support a flare on these landfills,” he says. “If our plant is down or we have some waste gas, it goes to a combustor or this flare. The next challenge for us is total recovery.”
Siegel says his company has documented that it can do total recovery through a pilot project the company had several years ago.
“The way I see it, the best use of landfill gases is the physical separation of the carbon dioxide and the methane and take the methane to the pipeline instead of combusting it in engines or doing what the Europeans do and incinerate it, which creates more carbon dioxide. You can separate the methane from the landfill—I believe that that’s where all the value is,” he says. “You put it in a natural gas pipeline or make CNG for vehicle fuel. That’s the wave of the future and the most beneficial use of landfill gas.”
Many conversion technologies will be unable to move forward without government support through grants and tax credits, Siegel points out.
“The Obama administration has allowed credits for electric and CNG, but nothing for high-Btu projects,” says Siegel. “There is a bill in Congress that would give some credit and once that bill is passed, there could be many more of these high-Btu projects on landfills. The capital cost is a lot less than other technologies out there and the return on the investment should be a lot better with more incentives from the government.”
Wastaway, a division of the Bouldin Corp. in McMinnville, TN, converts unsorted MSW into a product called Fluff, similar to wood pulp. Fluff can be gasified to generate steam, converted to a synthetic fuel, processed as a growing medium for nurseries or compressed and extruded to manufacture construction materials.
Typical clients are manufacturers of various combustion technologies or municipalities or industries dealing with waste issues.
The company has had one US facility in operation since June 2003 on a commercial basis, processing waste collected by Warren County, TN. The company currently processes half of the MSW for the island of Aruba.
“The energy-from-waste project regulatory environment is challenging in the US right now,” says Mark Brown, Bouldin’s chief executive officer. “It certainly is accepted better in Europe and in other countries than in the US. But we’re starting to see flexibility from the regulators as they realize that solar and wind are great, but we’re not going to be able to generate enough power from that. We need to be looking at all of our opportunities for renewable energy.”
Brown notes that it has been a couple of decades since there have been new energy-from-waste facilities built in the US.
“Even though it’s an established technology, in a lot of ways it’s a new technology in getting the governmental folks—even the engineers in some cases—comfortable with technology that maybe was popular in the 1980s and then fizzled for a variety of reasons.
“With hearsay from past failed projects, they weren’t sure what the problems were—they just know there have been problems, but haven’t taken the time to educate themselves to the new reality that modern facilities can operate efficiently and cleanly and in an environmentally friendly way.”
Another factor that influences why waste-from-energy is more readily embraced overseas is that there isn’t as strong of a grid there as here, notes Brown.
“In international locations where there is a weaker grid system, they cannot take advantage of solar and wind because they don’t have the base load, or if they do have base load, it’s expensive and not environmentally friendly,” he says. “For instance, we have some Caribbean facilities where diesel is their base load. With our technology, they are able to use a renewable source for the base load and still take advantage of solar and wind when those resources are available.”
Brown says he’s seeing a spike in interest in his company’s product over the past two years.
“It’s almost like a brand-new technology,” he notes. “Everyone just woke up and realized this is a usable product again.”
What’s driving that, says Brown, is a push for renewable portfolios “and the recognition by the engineering community that if we’re serious about 20% or 30% or whatever is the target of a particular area, energy-from-waste needs to be a part of that because we’re not just going to get there relying on solar and wind.
“There is plenty of market space for all three and any other technology that comes along. It’s a huge market and rather than fighting amongst ourselves about who is best, let’s all work together and develop the gigawatts necessary to power the country.”