The Difference Between Gasification and Incineration

I recently received an e-mail from a concerned citizen of Ontario. Jane Wilson was very upset with me because she'd heard my firm is planning to build a waste to energy plant in Sarnia, Ontario. She went on to say that it is impossible to run an incinerator without any emissions. Funnily enough I pretty much agree with her.

I tried to explain the difference between incineration and gasification, but she was not having any of it. She told me it was just semantics. Apparently she is a chemist and this gave her superior knowledge about such subjects.

Seeing that I was unable to get her to listen, let me set the record straight about these two issues.

Admittedly there are similarities, but that does not make them the same or the consequences of using them the same.

Incineration is simply burning. Burning requires oxygen either in the air or as a pure feed. When a substance is burnt, it is oxidized. If we burn hydrocarbons like those found in waste we typically get lots of CO2 and some water H2O. Waste is seldom pure and a lot of toxic substances are formed. These toxic substances are released to the atmosphere in smoke if it is not scrubbbed.

I was going to give you my own definition of gasification, but thought an independent 3rd party view might remove any bias that I have. Here's what Wikipedia says:

"Gasification is a process that converts carbonaceous materials, such as coal, petroleum, biofuel, or biomass, into carbon monoxide and hydrogen by reacting the raw material, such as house waste, or compost at high temperatures with a controlled amount of oxygen and/or steam. The resulting gas mixture is called synthesis gas or syngas and is itself a fuel. Gasification is a method for extracting energy from many different types of organic materials.

The advantage of gasification is that using the syngas is potentially more efficient than direct combustion of the original fuel because it can be combusted at higher temperatures or even in fuel cells, so that the thermodynamic upper limit to the efficiency defined by Carnot's rule is higher or not applicable. Syngas may be burned directly in internal combustion engines, used to produce methanol and hydrogen, or converted via the Fischer-Tropsch process into synthetic fuel. Gasification can also begin with materials that are not otherwise useful fuels, such as biomass or organic waste. In addition, the high-temperature combustion refines out corrosive ash elements such as chloride and potassium, allowing clean gas production from otherwise problematic fuels.

Gasification of fossil fuels is currently widely used on industrial scales to generate electricity. However, almost any type of organic material can be used as the raw material for gasification, such as wood, biomass, or even plastic waste."

Plasma gasification runs at about 5,500 degrees Celsius and immediately breaks everything down to its basic molecular structure. The only residue is an inert vitrified slag which can be used to make aggregate for construction.

You can learn more about gasification with this YouTube video.

As you can see the two processes are quite different and gasification offers a number of distinct advantages over incineration.

It is true that gasification does release some CO2, but that is generally less than what is produced by incineration.

Incineration can be used to create heat and steam for the generation of electricity, but the syngas produced by gasification can be used to make a number of value added commodities including liquid fuels like green diesel and ethanol.

There is no future for oil! The Future for oil is fine!

There is no future for oil! The Future for oil is fine!

Everyday the argument continues and the so called evidence mounts each day for both sides of the argument.

I personally believe that oil is finite and that we've probably reached peak production, but there are a lot of voices from people more qualified than me that might disagree. The announcement last week of BP's deep discovery in the Gulf of Mexico is being used by some to support the theory that there's lots more oil and that modern technology will help us find it and extract it.
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That may be true, but as the cost of finding and extracting oil climbs the search for alternatives grows. The problem is that many of the alternatives are not really viable today. Either they cost considerably more than oil, or they are not really scalable and so while contributing to the pool, do little to change the situation.

North America consumes about 8.16 billion barrels of oil per year. Biomass is often touted as the solution. There are about 1.3 billion tons of biomass available in the US to be turned into fuels. Canada probably has more, but i could not find the numbers i needed to confirm this. The problem with Canada is that most of the biomass is in remote areas and the costs of transport and harvesting make it unattractive at the present time.

The truth about biomass everywhere, is that it is expensive to grow, harvest and transport to fuels production facilities. I'm not saying biomass cant work, merely that there are large problems to which we have not found answers. If all of this biomass was converted to liquid fuels, I've estimated we'd create no more than 34% of the fuel needed for North America.

On the other hand waste presents a very interesting set of numbers.
*Municipal solid waste contains about 8000 BTU per pound.
*Each barrel of oil contains about 5.8 million BTUs.
*Each ton of waste converts to 2.7 barrels of liquid fuels
*We dump about a billion tons of waste into landfill each year

This means, using existing technology that we know works, we could produce 2.7 billion barrels of fuel from the MSW we produce and currently spend about $80 billion a year to dump in holes in the ground.

The beauty of converting waste to liquid fuels is that we kill two birds with one stone; we reduce our dependence on landfill and solve a number of the problems that go along with it like the escape of methane into the atmosphere, the leachate that seeps into our ground water and the odors that affect all who are close by.

However more importantly if we were to convert all of this waste we could produce about 37% of North America's fuel needs from a widely distributed energy resource. We go a long way to reducing our dependence on foreign oil and we produce a fuel that is one of the greenest on the planet.

It is unlikely that in the short term there will be the capital available to convert all of our hydrocarbon waste to fuels, but if the governments of the world want to create green jobs, this technology would be a good place to put money.

Fischer Tropsch fuels contain no sulfur, no particulates, no nitrous compounds and no aromatics. Their life cycle greenhouse gases are among the lowest of all fuels and their is a huge carbon offset from the waste diverted from landfill.

What's also important is that these fuels can be produced today, with virtually no technology risk. This technology has been around for over 80 years but only operating at very large scale. With second generation advances it is now possible to build economically viable small scale plants that would provide waste handling solutions to the more than 336 cities around the world with more than 1,000,000 people.

I recently returned from Cleantech Boston where there was much talk of waste to energy, but most were talking about using waste to generate electricity. There's no doubt that this approach works, but it is low value add when compared with fuels. More about this in a later blog.

Is Peak Oil real or Imagined?

There is a lot of discussion over peak oil; if it is real; if it is here or still to come.

The article below presents the most compelling data on peak oil that I've seen in a long time.

http://truecostblog.com/2009/07/14/is-peak-oil-real-a-list-of-countries-past-peak/"

Whether you are a believer or a doubter, Praveen Ghanta's data is worth looking at.

I have long believed that peak oil is a reality. I just didn't know for sure if we'd reached it or not. Now the answer is clear and tells me that apart from any environmental reasons or social reasons, the new alternative fuels from waste business I'm building is the right thing at the right time.

What's more, the data reinforces that we need every type of alternative fuel if we are to avoid an energy catastrophe once the down turn is over. The IEA's report from last year shows we'll need an additional 45 million barrels per day to meet demand by 2030.

Based on my own research, this new supply wont come from new oil discoveries. Our only chance is alternatives, but we have to move now because these things take time to prove and to scale up. We have to look at everything from bio-fuels to electric vehicles and every energy source from biomass to waste.

Fischer Tropsch is proven and ready to go, most of the other alternatives have problems with scaling up, social implications or are too early stage. Now is the time to act.

Advantages of Green Diesel Over Bio-diesel.

What is "green" diesel and how is it different from bio-diesel?

Almost everyone has heard of bio-diesel and most of us know that it is fuel made from plant or animal material, usually plant material is grown specially for the purpose of making fuel.

Wiki describes it as follows:

Biodiesel refers to a vegetable oil or animal fat based diesel fuel consisting of long-chain alkyl (methyl, propyl or ethyl) esters. Biodiesel is typically made by chemically-reacting lipids (e.g., vegetable oil, animal fat (tallow)) and alcohol.

Biodiesel is meant to be used in standard diesel engines and is thus distinct from the vegetable and waste oils used to fuel converted diesel engines.

On Wiki, I could find no definition for green diesel however I think there is an important distinction to be made here.

Green diesel is chemically different than bio diesel, and it can be made from waste streams destined for landfill. It's green because it is preventing waste from going to landfill, and it's green because its "well to wheels" GHG footprint is the lowest of all fuels.

What is often overlooked in bio diesel is just how much fossil fuel is used to create it and just how much GHG are released from the time land is cleared and planted to the time the bio diesel is used in an engine. Following its life cycle, soy oil creates more than twice the green house gas emissions of green diesel made from biomass, according to a study by MIT researcher HM Wong.

The process to produce green diesel is very different from how bio diesel is made.

To make green diesel, waste and or biomass is first sorted to remove recyclables and other undesirable elements. It is then gasified at very high temperatures (10,000-12,000 degrees C.) where the molecular bonds are broken and then the syngas that is produced is passed over a catalyst at elevated temperatures. (More details of this process can be found at www.alternativefuelscorp.com )

The process was developed by two German scientists over 80 years ago, is well documented and is seen by many scientists and energy analysts as one of the most likely to succeed alternative fuel. In South Africa, 30% of the fuel is produced using this process.

Typically Fischer Tropsch, as the process is known, is used to convert coal and natural gas to liquid fuels, so the 1st generation process itself is not considered green because it is not sustainable, emits large amounts of CO2 and the raw materials are fossil based.

However using biomass or waste, 2nd generation Fischer Tropsch creates an ultra clean fuel from a sustainable source and can be set up to produce no emissions.

So what are the benefits of green diesel over bio diesel?

1. There is no competition between crops and fuels over land use. In fact when using waste, land that would be used for landfill could be freed up to produce food crops or for other uses. It is estimated that if every acre of arable land in the USA was put to producing fuels, it would supply no more than 10% of what is needed every year.
2. The other issue in the area of land use is one of soil cycles. How many times can you keep planting the same land with the same crops before the land becomes exhausted? Yes you can add fertilizer, but that again is mostly fossil derived and the run-off pollutes our rivers and lakes.
   
3. The fuels produced by Fischer Tropsch also include a gasoline fraction and these fuels contain no sulphur, no particulates, no aromatics and no nitrous compounds, making them very clean burning and reducing the production of acid rain. Green diesel does not create the black smoke we all have experienced when driving behind trucks because it contains no particulates.
   
4. Green diesel can be used in any diesel engine without modification. Other fractions can be used to run aircraft engines. This means that we can run cars, trucks, trains, boats, planes and generators on FT fuels without exacerbating GHG levels.
5. Landfill waste is a problem for which there is no immediate solution. It costs north America about $80 billion dollars to bury a billion barrels of oil each year. As standards of living around the world improve, so does the volume of waste and at present waste seems inexhaustible. So this is truly a renewable fuel with far greater environmental benefits than bio-diesel. See my June 17th 2009 blog posting for details about recycling at the molecular level.
   
6. Green diesel produced from BTL (biomass to liquids) or WTL (waste to liquids) doesn't smell like fossil diesel. In fact it has a pleasant kind of soap smell. So its not unpleasant either on the road or at the fuel pump. Bio diesel reputedly smells like french fries when used in engines, I'm not sure I want to be riding behind that first thing in the morning, but perhaps that's just me.
   
7. In cold climates green diesel has a great advantage over bio-diesel. It doesn't cloud or gel until much lower temperatures (-40C) making it ideal for cool climates like Canada and the mid-west of the US. Imagine having to warm your fuel before starting out on a cold morning!
   
8. Because it has exactly the same chemical properties as fossil based diesel, it can be blended with regular diesel, stored and distributed using the same infrastructure.
   
9. Although chemically identical to fossil diesel, it has a higher cetane rating and on a gallon for gallon basis contains 22% more energy.
   

All in all with all these advantages I believe this makes green diesel a pretty good alternative.

• It's cleaner
• It's greener
• It's sustainable

Let me know what you think.