Companies turning trash into energy
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While trash to power isn’t a new idea, Geoplasma, a sister company of Atlanta-based Jacoby Development Inc., has a grand plan to take it into the science fiction realm and do away with dumps by vaporizing garbage into synthetic gas and steam to create electricity.
The company plans to build a $425 million plasma arc gasification facility here in St. Lucie County, the first of its kind in the nation and the largest in the world. The facility should be up in about two years.
It will generate heat hotter than the sun’s surface and will gasify and melt 3,000 tons of garbage a day by creating an arc between two electrodes and using high pressure air to form plasma. It’s a process similar to how lightning is formed in nature.
St. Lucie County officials estimate their entire landfill ? 4.3 million tons of trash ? will be gone in 18 years.
No byproduct will go unused, according to Geoplasma. The plant will produce enough synthetic gas ? a substitute for natural gas ? to power up to 43,000 homes annually, and to run the facility free from outside electricity.
Locally, WastAway is working on refining similar technology. The local plant already recycles the Warren County?s trash and turns it in usable fluff.
Like Geoplasma, WastAway is in the process of installing a gasifier at its facility in the Mt. View Industrial Park. According to WastAway president Floyd Bouldin, plans call for the gasifier to produce enough energy to run all in-house WastAway equipment.
The process of turning trash into energy isn?t an entirely new concept. Some waste management facilities have been converting methane ? created by rotting trash in landfills ? to power. Plants also burn trash to produce electricity.
Houston-based Waste Management Inc., the largest private waste management company in North America, has processed 118 million tons of garbage into energy in the past 30 years, equivalent to about 120 million barrels of oil, said company spokeswoman Lynn Brown.
The company hopes to one day capture all usable methane gas from its more than 280 active landfills to create the renewable energy equivalent of about 22 million barrels of oil a year, roughly equivalent to American consumption in a single day, Brown said.
But experts say population growth will limit space available for future landfills.
“We’ve only got the size of the planet. We can’t create more space,” said Richard Tedder, program administrator for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s solid waste division. “Because of all of the pressures of development, people don’t want landfills. It’s going to be harder and harder to site new landfills, and it’s going to be harder for existing landfills to continue to expand as people move in next to them.”
The facility in St. Lucie County, on central Florida’s Atlantic Coast, aims to solve that problem by eliminating the need for a landfill. Only two similar facilities are operating in the world ? both in Japan ? but are gasifying garbage on a much smaller scale.
“It’s high on the list of interest as far as the federal government,” said Rick Brandes, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency’s waste minimization division. “For the amount of energy produced, you get significantly less of certain pollutants like sulfur dioxide and particulate matter.”
Brandes said the European Union is also studying the technology for reducing waste and producing power.
But Bruce Parker, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based National Solid Wastes Management Association, scoffs at the notion that plasma technology will eliminate the need for landfills. Americans generated 236 million tons of garbage in 2003, about 4.5 pounds per person, per day, according to the latest figures from the EPA. Roughly 130 million tons went to landfills ? enough to cover a football field 703 miles high with garbage.