Ottawa Building North America’s First Gasification Facility
Written by Jaymi Heimbuch
Monday, 14 July 2008
ecogeek.org
Ottawa, Ontario's city counselors have unanimously approved the building of a waste-to-energy facility that will daily convert 400 metric tons of trash to 21 megawatts of net electricity. The plant will be able to power about 19,000 homes. That's a whole lot of garbage lighting up a whole lot of homes.
The plant, proposed by PlascoEnergy Group, will use gasification (rather than more commonly used incineration) to generate electricity, and they’re hoping they can use a cooler gasification process to lower the cost to a competitive price. The plant will utilize plasma-torch technology to break down trash into syngas – a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide – which can be burned in turbines and engines to create electricity. It’s an expensive endeavor, hence the worry about getting the process tweaked to lower costs. They're also relying on the right combination of rising costs for traditional electricity and fees collected from the city. Sounds a little risky, but possibly doable. There's probably a few creative financing angles they could toss around too, in terms of trash collecting and whatnot, should the new gasification process turn out to be not be as money saving as they hope.
The facility will be North America’s first, but similar plants in Europe and Asia can be used as examples. And the new plant likely won’t be lonely for very long. Hawaii also approved $100 M in bonds for a gasification plant using similar technology, and competitor Ze-gen is starting up a pilot plant on a much smaller scale in Massachusetts that will use molten rock to break down garbage. Other waste-to-fuel plants use gasification to make syngas, which is then used to make ethanol. Ottawa’s plant, however, would turn it directly into electricity. The plant could be operating in as soon as three years, which isn’t a whole lot of time to get their process and plant put together. We'll have to wait and see if they can get all their ducks lined up to make the plant feasible.
Via TechnologyReview; Photo via PlascoEnergy Group
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