[GreenYes] Re: Biosolids. Fla Plasma Redux base elements and gas

[LWheeler45@no.address]

Plant seeks to make landfills obsolete  producing power from trash
BY BRIAN  SKOLOFF 
ASSOCIATED PRESS  WRITER 
FORT PIERCE, Fla. -- Welcome  to the future, where trash is fuel and 
landfills are obsolete.

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.

Molten material much like lava created from melted organic  matter - up to 
600 tons a day - will be hardened into rock form, or slag, and  sold for use in 
road and construction projects. It will also gasify sludge from  the county's 
wastewater plant, and steam will be sold to a neighboring Tropicana  Products 
Inc. facility to power the juice plant's turbines.

"This is  sustainability in its truest and finest form," Geoplasma President 
Hilburn  Hillestad said.

For years, 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.

"We do know that plasma arc is a legitimate technology, but  let's see first 
how this thing works for St. Lucie County," Parker said. "It's  too soon for 
people to make wild claims that we won't need  landfills."

NASA began using similar technology in the 1960s to simulate  heat generated 
during a spacecraft's re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. The  technology is 
also used to melt steel from car parts.

The torch used in  Geoplasma's design is made by Westinghouse Plasma Corp.

"It's really a  form of artificial lightning," said Louis Circeo, director of 
Georgia Tech's  plasma research division, which is helping with Geoplasma's  
development.

Circeo said that as energy prices soar and landfill fees  increase, plasma 
arc technology will become more affordable.

"Municipal  solid waste is perhaps the largest renewable energy resource that 
is available  to us," Circeo said, adding that the process "could not only 
solve the garbage  and landfill problems in the United States and elsewhere, but 
it could  significantly alleviate the current energy crisis."

He said that if large  plasma facilities were put to use nationwide to 
vaporize trash, they could  theoretically generate electricity equivalent to about 
25 nuclear  reactors.

Geoplasma expects to recoup it's $425 million investment,  funded by bonds, 
within 20 years through the sale of electricity and  slag.

"That's the silver lining," said company president Hillestad,  adding that 
St. Lucie County won't pay a dime.

The company expects to  generate worldwide interest with the Florida 
facility, which will serve as a  model to prove its effectiveness.

Leo Cordeiro, the county's solid waste  director, said officials have been 
researching ways to reduce landfilled garbage  for several years and reached out 
to Geoplasma for help.

"We didn't want  to do it like everybody else," Cordeiro said. "We knew there 
were better  ways."

County Commissioner Chris Craft said the plasma process "is bigger  than just 
the disposal of waste for St. Lucie County."

"It addresses two  of the world's largest problems - how to deal with solid 
waste and the energy  needs of our communities," Craft said. "This is the end 
of the rainbow. It will  change the world."

On The Net:

Geoplasma:

Westinghouse  Plasma Corp.: 

Last modified: August 19. 2006  12:01AM
 
Leonard  E. Wheeler, Jr.,


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