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Renewable Energy
Plasma Arc The Leading Light?
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Victory for Greenpeace as Facebook Un-Likes Coal
http://blog.cleantechies.com/2012/01/13/greenpeace-facebook-likes-coal/
The release last month of a joint announcement by Greenpeace and Facebook marks the end of one of the most interesting green campaigns of recent years. Greenpeace first targeted Facebook 20 months ago, after the social media giant announced a new purpose-built data center, which it turned out would depend on electricity mainly generated from coal. Facebook cited its commitment to building an energy-efficient data center, but Greenpeace argued that ignoring the prime source of energy for the site undermined other green elements of the strategy.
According to the new statement, Facebook is now committed to using renewable energy in future data centers and also offers to promote this approach to other companies:
Facebook is committed to supporting the development of clean and renewable sources of energy, and our goal is to power all of our operations with clean and renewable energy. Building on our leadership in energy efficiency (through the Open Compute Project), we are working in partnership with Greenpeace and others to create a world that is highly efficient and powered by clean and renewable energy.
A number of specific activities are also mentioned in the statement. Facebook has committed to adopting a siting policy that states a preference for access to clean and renewable energy supply, and funding research into energy efficiency that will be shared through the Open Compute Project. The company will also “Engage in a dialogue with our utility providers about increasing the supply of clean energy that power Facebook data centers.”
Greenpeace, meanwhile, will help support for the Open Compute Project, by encouraging companies to join in, use the technology, and share their own efficiency innovations, and will encourage utilities to offer ways for customers to get their utility data.
Purists may decry the lack of specific goals or actions relating to existing data centers, but the statement clearly marks an acceptance by Facebook of Greenpeace’s basic argument. The biggest irony of the campaign of course is that Greenpeace used the facilities of Facebook to campaign against Facebook. More than 700,000 people signed up to the organization’s Unfriend Coal page on Facebook (which now includes a timeline description of campaign). Now that same platform (though not necessarily that page) will be used to encourage energy efficiency and to convince other companies to adopt clean energy sources.
The Open Compute project mentioned in the statement was started by Facebook as a means of sharing its own work on energy efficiency in the data center. While the initiative sought to counter some of the flack being received from Greenpeace, it also addressed an important criticism of many of the major Internet companies with regard to their secrecy over their data center operations. The new sense of cooperation between Facebook and Greenpeace is likely to put more pressure on other Internet and cloud providers to increase their transparency in this area. The campaign demonstrates the importance and visibility that is now attached to data center facilities and the fact that citing a low power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating isn’t enough to satisfy environmental campaigners.
The power of Facebook, Twitter and other social media is now becoming evident on a daily basis. In our recent report Social Media in the Utility Industry, for example, we estimate that in 2011 more than 57 million utility customers worldwide will use some form of social media to engage with their electricity providers, and that number will grow to 624 million by the end of 2017. As Facebook found, important conversations are already going on that will impact your business, whether you’re involved or not.
Eric Woods is an analyst at Pike Research who focuses on the smart grid and green information technology
ADVANCED PLASMA POWER PLASMA ARC FLUIDISED BED GASIFICATION PLANT
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Plasco’s tomorrow man
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/sports/Plasco+tomorrow/5964980/story.html
OTTAWA CITIZEN
Plasco’s tomorrow man
The company’s chief scientist is already thinking about the company’s next breakthrough
By David Reevely, The Ottawa Citizen January 9, 2012
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Andreas Tsangaris is the chief scientist at Plasco Energy, which has just won a contract from the City of Ottawa, to convert garbage to energy using the company’s unique plasma gasification process. He is sitting beside a Galileo Thermometer he has in his office.
Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington, Ottawa Citizen
OTTAWA — One of the people least affected by the landmark deal Plasco Energy Group has reached with the City of Ottawa is the company’s chief scientist and longest-serving employee.
For the company, the deal is huge, worth $182 million over 20 years. More, actually, figuring in inflation and the potential for another 20 years of extensions. In its first major commercial deal, the Ottawa-based company is to take 300 tonnes a day of the city’s residential garbage and run it through Plasco’s “plasma gasification” process to turn it into electricity, water, and a glassy leftover slag.
“It’s exciting that we are at the last step, or one of the last steps, of this process,” Andreas Tsangaris says. But really, his work is done, except for final fine-tuning on the demonstration project that’s to be the template for a multi-unit commercial plant. “There is no more research that will be done for this version. … The phases are three, four, five years.”
Soft-spoken and Greek-accented, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, Tsangaris occupies an interior office on the fourth floor of a nondescript building in Kanata. Cubicles for his seven staff are just outside his door, closer to the view of the Alcatel-Lucent complex a couple of blocks away. The decorations are modest: a gilded map (from the Bombay Company), a poster of the Winged Victory of Samothrace (from the Louvre), a Galilean thermometer that tells the temperature with buoyant bulbs of coloured liquid (from someplace Tsangaris can’t remember). It’s small and uncluttered. A place to work.
Tsangaris is a Greek Cypriot by birth, an Ottawan by choice and chance. The youngest of six children, the 56-year-old graduated from an English-language school that gave him a British-standard diploma.
“I was going toward studying in Britain,” he says. And then the Turks invaded and put that out of reach of his family’s finances.
But a scholarship from the Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship Association sent him to Carleton University in 1976.
“They told me where I would go, and I said, ‘all right.’” He earned two engineering degrees.
Plasco has been in its Innovation Drive quarters for about four years, a time that has coincided with its increasing velocity toward the Ottawa deal. But it’s far from a startup: the company and its predecessors have worked in Ottawa since the 1970s, seeking commercial uses for plasma technology that its long-ago founder, Terry Grinnell, first saw as a military officer on an exchange with NASA.
Super-hot torches were used to test heat shields for space shuttles and could run for seven to 10 minutes, the same length of time a shuttle spent re-entering the earth’s atmosphere; the company’s first challenge was inventing torches that could run longer. It set up in Ottawa to be close to the federal science establishment.
Tsangaris joined the company, then called Resorption Canada, as employee No. 1. His master’s thesis at Carleton was relevant to the company’s research and a professor put him in touch. “We were sort of looking for each other.”
Since then, it’s been a long, slow mission of developing the plasma technology and finding uses for it — funded by this or that program, benefiting from this or that partnership, as government policy and private industry’s interests changed. Tsangaris’ early work focused on the “energy balance” of the process, working out how much energy had to be run through waste of various kinds in order to break it down, and how much energy could be extracted from the waste’s components. His name is on two dozen patents.
“The idea, initially, was to produce what we used,” he says, to make the process run on the energy it generated. That meant refining (and refining, and refining) to minimize the use of the high-power plasma torches and maximize the energy captured.
“In the 1980s, the main focus was the environment,” he says. “There was not much emphasis, for the world, on recovering waste because the projections for energy from sources like nuclear were so large.”
And nobody was thinking much about running out of room in landfills. Hazardous waste — PCBs, heavy metals, poisons of all kinds — was a problem in vogue and plasma technology was seen as a way of solving it, but the company also worked on hospital waste and regular garbage. Residential waste is such a hodgepodge that if you can devise a gasification process that works on it, that process will work on almost anything.
And that, Tsangaris says, is Plasco’s major scientific achievement. It’s easy to burn garbage to heat water to make steam to turn a turbine to make electricity.
“Boilers and steam turbines are very, very forgiving,” he says, “but much less efficient.”
Plasco’s trick is to break down garbage’s complex molecules into simple elements and then recombine them into its famous “syngas,” which is burned in engines to directly generate electricity.
“Gas engines are temperamental,” Tsangaris says. “Once they are turned to a certain level, they need to be fed the fuel they’re expecting.”
It takes a sophisticated control system to make sure that no matter what random crud is dropped into one end of Plasco’s system, the same quality of gas comes out the other.
Like all the early Plasco team, who worked partly for cash and partly for equity, Tsangaris owns a piece of the company. He won’t say how much, but considering the hundreds of millions of dollars the company has raised from investors, it can’t be large.
“The way we all see it is, it’s better to have a small piece of a big, safe pie than a large piece of a small pie that might not be there,” he says.
The outside investment comes, in large part, from the work of Rod Bryden, the former Systemhouse and Ottawa Senators boss who came to head Plasco in 2005.
People who labour away on a technology for decades before a swashbuckler like Bryden arrives to take over might chafe. Tsangaris says he doesn’t: Bryden’s arrival was exciting, he says.
“You can go to war with him and you know he’s a good leader,” Tsangaris says.
Bryden brought financial acumen, corporate contacts and a feel for the market.
“I was an engineer and I knew I could make it work,” Tsangaris says. “I could talk about it, but I couldn’t sell it. … To take it to its full potential needed somebody like Rod Bryden.”
Bryden oriented the company for commercial success, Tsangaris says. Plasco could still apply itself to disposing of hazardous waste, for instance, and that’s potentially an extremely lucrative market, but it’s much less stable. Municipal garbage might make less money by the tonne, but it can produce steady long-term contracts like the one with Ottawa.
He is not bothered, he says, by the people who’ve said that Bryden is a snake-oil merchant and Plasco’s process is unproven at best, hocus-pocus at worst.
“I feel that they are wrong. I cannot be angry. There are people who will believe what they will believe. We have the data to prove it.”
His R&D team will support the new commercial plant however they’re needed, he says, but their main job is to look ahead to Plasco’s “generation-two technologies,” processes and techniques that aren’t protected by patents yet. They’re physically separated in Plasco’s office from the people working on current projects so that they won’t, as engineers do, chat about interesting problems they’re working on and risk even an innocent leak.
The next generation occupies Tsangaris’s thoughts at night, when he goes home to his wife and two sons at their home near Hogs Back. At bedtime, he says, he doesn’t read or count sheep. To take his mind off today, he thinks about tomorrow.
“My job is to bring new things to the company. Not all of them will be things that will end up being useful, though of course that’s the intention. But always to be thinking ahead.
“During the relaxation time, that’s when you can let your mind go.”
ottawacitizen.com/greaterottawa
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Grundon outlines revised plans for Perth waste-to-energy plant
The firm behind plans to build a waste-to-energy plant on Perth’s Shore Road has outlined its intentions to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and Perth and Kinross Council.
- Incinerator firm Grundon urged to ‘pack their bags’ and leave Perth
- · Councillor wants businesses to sign up to his Grundon incinerator fight
- · Perth councillor Peter Barrett ups the ante in opposition to waste incinerator
- · Revised Grundon incinerator plans are threat to Perth, warns councillor
- · Scaled-down plans for incinerator put to council by Grundon Waste Management
- · MP says Grundon’s perseverance is like a ‘noose round the necks’ of Perth folk
Grundon Waste Management has returned to the table with Advanced Plasma Power Ltd (APP) with plans for a gasification plant — a scheme that has attracted thousands of objections.
Grundon claims its new plan addresses the reasons for its previous failure and new technology to turn waste into sustainable power and creates useable by-products.
Rather than incineration, ultraviolet light is used to convert waste to a fuel gas.
Martin Brooks, engineering director for APP, said, “The input to the plant would be a pre-treated, refuse-derived fuel produced off site, dried into a ‘floc’ material. This is gasified in a fluidised bed gasifier, producing solid chars and ash, as well as a syngas, which at this stage still contains tars and soot.
“We then use a plasma arc converter — used in other industries, for example to separate platinum from old catalytic converters as well as in steel production — to crack the impurities in the syngas and clean it up.
“At the same time the ash and the inorganic elements are vitrified —turned into a glass-like product known as Plasmarok. This is used, for instance, as a secondary aggregate to replace the extraction of primary materials being quarried for construction jobs.
“Finally, the clean gas powers gas engines which generate secure, clean heat and power.”
Grundon’s Bob Nicholson said the change in technology (from the originally intended incinerator) means instead of one large building, the process would be accommodated in a series of smaller buildings with a 34-metre chimney.
He said, “The new scale, design, appearance and layout mean the proposed development would be a similar size to other buildings in the local area.”
He added, “We have also redesigned the layout so the significant noise generating plant would be in a fully enclosed building at the north of the site, furthest away from the prison.”
Despite assurances the scheme has been branded by protesters as too dangerous for a town centre site and has attracted thousands of objections.
Photo by Flickr user eastleighbusman.
$30 Million Gasification Equipment Contract in Mexico
28 July 2011
Emerging Mexican industrial, hazardous and toxic waste disposal services company, Scorpex, has agreed an equipment purchase contract with Kentucky, U.S. based International Environmental Technologies, Inc. (IET).
The contract covers the acquisition and installation of waste gasification/thermal oxidation equipment as well as a license to use the technology at Scorpex’s site in in the Baja California, Mexico.
Scorpex says that it has agreed to a total purchase price of $30 million. As terms of the agreement.
Under the agreement, $9 million will be paid upon the release of funds from Scorpex’s lender, $9 million will be paid upon IET’s delivery of a certification that the shop drawings and other engineering work for the installation has been completed, $9 million upon IET’s once erection of the steel framework for the two units has been completed and the final $3 million upon the final check out, testing and commissioning.
IET will install the equipment, train supervisory personnel to operate and maintain the equipment, provide a set of spare parts and issue certificates of completion. According to Scorpex, IET has also agreed to provide a warranty for the equipment installed. If malfunction is reported within the warranty period, IET will repair or replace the defective or non-conforming part.
Scorpex says that the IET system that it has selected features a low capital investment, as well as low operating costs and an average construction time of six to twelve months.
Scorpex’s CEO comments, “Signing such a major equipment contract at the dawn of establishing our first waste disposal and processing plant is yet another strong vote of confidence by others who have chosen to join our initiative to address Mexico’s growing demand for industrial, hazardous and toxic waste management.”
green groups re plasma arc
US Green Groups speak out:
Incinerator NO
Plasma gasification YES PLEASE
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Hong Kong MSW – mass burn moving grate planned
CTA says: On Backchat 4th Jan 2012 Mr Elvis Au of EPD stated the largest plasma gasification plant was only processing 220 tonnes of waste per day and that he had been in touch with Plasma arc plant suppliers. Since we have contacted all of them we find this statement ‘strange’, to be kind to Mr Au.
Mr Au was not seemingly unaware that a 350,000 tonne per year MSW plant had received planning permission to proceed building on Tees side UK.
One of the plasma arc waste to energy company replies is shown below: seems quite clear to us. Perhaps our EPD sees the reply differently ?
Plasma arc vaporizes waste into its molecular state and the gases are collected and cleaned to make Syngas that is burned to generate electricity. Instead of paying to burn waste in an incinerator the gasified waste produces electricity for the grid. The residues of gasification are plasmarok which can be ground and used as aggregate.
Win-Win. Also since the plants are modular they can be discreetly sited closer to the waste streams in different areas of Hong Kong rather than one mega plant on a remote man-made island.
From: James Middleton [mailto:dynamco@netvigator.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2012 07:16
To: ‘elvis_au@epd.gov.hk‘
Cc: ‘backchat@rthk.org.hk‘
Subject: : Hong Kong MSW – mass burn moving grate planned –
Plasma Gasification plants are modular
How big do you want ?
—–Original Message—–
From: Brian Miloski [mailto:miloski@solenagroup.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2012 00:29
To: James Middleton
Subject: RE: Hong Kong MSW – mass burn moving grate planned –
James –
There is no theoretical limit. The gasification chambers are simple modular and you add on as many as you need. For example, our reference design uses four reactors running at 80% capacity processing approximately 2000 TPD. To process 3000 TPD, we’d simply add two more reactors….and so on and so on. Limitations on sizes of any gasification technology is generally feedstock based, not technology based.
BRIAN MILOSKI
CFO, Solena
miloski@solenafuels.com<mailto:miloski@solenafuels.com><mailto:miloski@solenafuels.com>
This message, including its contents and any attachments, are highly CONFIDENTIAL and for its intended recipients only. If this message was received in error, please delete it immediately.
________________________________
From: James Middleton [dynamco@netvigator.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2012 12:48 AM
To: Brian Miloski
Subject: Hong Kong MSW – mass burn moving grate planned – Message was found to be spam: (100%) IP is in RBL,
Dear Chairman / CEO
I am the Chairman of www.cleartheair.org.hk<http://www.cleartheair.org.hk> a leading NGO in Hong Kong.
The local Hong Kong Government intends to build an MSW mass burn incinerator (the first of two to be built) in Hong Kong. We are objecting to this old technology. Hong Kong currently dumps 3000 tonnes MSW, 3000 tonnes food waste and 3000 tonnes construction waste in landfill per day.
The HK Government EPD says (onair today)
http://programme.rthk.hk//assets/contentindex/asx/radio3_514_164537_15898.asx<http://programme.rthk.hk/assets/contentindex/asx/radio3_514_164537_15898.asx>
that they have checked plasma arc technology and the current plasma arc plants only can handle 220 tonnes per day. Obviously Airproducts’ Teesside UK plant will handle 900+ tonnes per day from their press release.
We understand the plasma technology and background and are supporting it.
My question is simple – what is the largest possible MSW gasification plant you could build ?
Could a plant be built using plasma arc chambers that could handle 3,000 tonnes MSW per day ? 6,000 tonnes per day ? more ?
Kind regards,
James Middleton
chair@cleartheair.org.hk<mailto:chair@cleartheair.org.hk>
dynamco@netvigator.com<mailto:dynamco@netvigator.com>
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