GASSING UP Could one city's rotting rubbish soon release far less methane -- and provide power for 50,000 homes?
Image: Isado, via Flickr
Every year 130 million tons of America’s trash ends up in landfills. Together the dumps emit more of the greenhouse gas methane than any other human-related source. But thanks to plasma technology, one city’s rotting rubbish will soon release far less methane—and provide power for 50,000 homes—because of an innovation in plasma technology backed by Atlanta-based Geoplasma.
Engineers have developed an efficient torch for blasting garbage with a stream of
superheated gas, known as plasma. When trash is dropped into a chamber and heated
to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, its organic components—food, fluids, paper—vaporize into a hot, pressurized gas, which turns a turbine to generate electricity. Steam, a by-product, can generate more. Inorganic refuse such as metals condense at the bottom and can be used in roadbeds and heavy construction.
Several small plasma plants exist around the world for industrial processes, but Geoplasma is constructing the first U.S. plasma refuse plant in St. Lucie County, Florida. The plant is scheduled to go online by 2011; it will process 1,500 tons of garbage a day, sending 60 megawatts of electricity to the power grid (after using some to power itself).
Emissions are far lower than in standard incineration, and the process reduces landfill volume and methane release. Power prices are projected to be on par with electricity from natural gas. The difference, says Ron Roberts, St. Lucie County’s assistant director of solid waste, is that “you’re getting rid of a problem and making it a positive.”
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Florida's Garbage Vaporized".
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18 Comments
Add CommentIt's great to see this type of technology finally taking hold. I'm wondering if plasma tech can be used to reverse the effects of an existing landfill. Living in Staten Island, NY, home of the largest landfill ever created, I can only dream of a day when I can drive past the landfill and see the priistine, flat salt marshes that once existed instead of the largest man-made mountain of trash that can even be seen from orbit. This would benefit NYC greatly.The city presently pays remarkable fees for PA to accept our trash since the S.I. landfill recently closed. All proceeds from this power source could go to the residents in the form of lower utility bills or lower property taxes. Everyone wins.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis came out in pop-sci a few years ago, and yes it seems like a totally COTS system would be "free money", especially when folks expect to pay you to take their garbage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, if you throw a ton of garbage out, there must be a hole where you dug a ton of stuff to make the garbage. Why is everyone afraid of land-fill? we're just moving "dirt" from one pile to another.
There's no "hole" in a landfill. It just piles higher and higher until , as in the case of Staten Island, it becomes the tallest hill on the east coast! And unless you've driven past one, you could never imagine why people fear a landfill. Aside from the gag reflex are the long-term medical conditions linked to exposure to the air as well as toxic runoff into the water supply. It took decades for the local communities and politicians to finally end this nightmare. If plasma technology can help us avoid landfills, then I'm all for it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn reply to rustys comment, when humans mine or harvest resources to create consumables that will one day turn into trash, its not just moving general "dirt" around because we take normally harmless things such as iron ore, petroleum, and natural plant products and make things like pesticides, lead batteries, or seemingly harmless plastic containers (which decay and release carcinogens). Then we concentrate them, and put them in an eco system not capable of fully and efficiently breaking them down. Its man refining natural things and concentrating them in one pinpoint spot in a local eco system thats harmfull.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTry this: Go to a quarry to buy 5 lbs Iron/ aluminum ore, a recycling plant to obtain a similar volume of plastic, and a grocery store for food stuffs comonly eaten. powder the ores,smelt them and leave the metal pellets as they are. next melt the plastic and shredd it to pieces in a blender or the like. mix the two together with the food stuffs and you have a very similar representation of a trash dump. Pile it in your back yard, mabey throw some dirt and water on it every once in a while, and youll find that the food composted, the plastics dyes/oils degraded and left them bleached yet intact, and the metals oxidised into an oxide that isnt directly used by most plants or animals and concentrated to toxic levels for its volume for anything that does use it. Now that pile with remain there well beyond your lifetime. But thats not a problem for most is it? Out of sight, out of mind, Right? Now take that same pile and put it in the center of your living room. Observe the problems of living in trash.
Trash dumps are a temporary* archaeic 'solution' that no longer works in a modern world where no square inch of habitable land is uninhabited; we still have piles of trash in our living/ operating spaces and cannot just keep moving our refuse from "one pile to another".
the state of oregon made recycling a sate law and, to the best of my knowledge, has no new or operating landfills, and reduces some taxes on the blue collar folk by reselling the recycled materials to manufacturers and making a profit.
Reworking land-fill sites using plasma techniques may appear to be a good ecological solution to waste tips.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany years ago I explored a cave system which lay under a limestone quarry-floor which had been land-filled. The cave contained lakes of cocoa-coloured water at 60 °C that defied chemical analysis, but which was toxic to aquatic life. The lake is still there and still steaming!
Before we get to recover land fills, they will have heavily polluted underlying aquifers with leachates. Time is of the essence.
Isn't waste a design flaw? The "Cradle to Cradle" design philosophy says that waste = food. Organic nutrients should go back to the farms and gardens, inorganic back into the industrial ecosystem. We have to get this right because we are simply running out of 'stuff' to mine. We are approaching peak oil, peak gas, peak coal, peak copper, peak rare earths... and will one day even hit 'peak iron ore' (See Lester Brown's projections for a 2% annual increase in iron ore consumption and how long that will last, based on USGS figures.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWaste = food. It's the only way we can "consume" without consuming all the earth's resources.
Well Rusty, even Birds dont S**T in their own Nests, that is a very basic principle of survival.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo one is afraid of Landfill, its just a really stupid way of dealing with the problem
It is more than just "dirt" that is moved in the process of creating and manufacturing products. I do like the idea of using decaying organic matter and other materials to produce energy. However there are responsibilites of trying to reduce the amount of refuse that we produce that end up in land fills. It is not just the movement of dirt. These raw materials must be extracted from the Earth and shipped and further processed so that we can have stuff... and more stuff... and more stuff. Reducing the amount of anything that a person uses and recycling anything else is the ecologically responsible thing to do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour article is the long-awaited epilogue to a 1969 article in Scientific American by my late business partner Dr. Bernard (Ben) Eastlund (and a co-author) describing the Plasma Torch, their brilliant concept. Ben should receive the posthumous credit he deserves with an acknowledgment. As always, he was ahead of his time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Marshal Greenblatt, Fusion Systems Corporation
As lovely as this is - what is the net energy effect?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd why - instead of loosing energy to the turning of turbines (what percentage of the net energy is being used to do that?)
There is a process that takes this one step further that is in use in several parts of the world - MHD (magnetohydrdynamics) where the plasma stream is "run" through a series of permanent magnets and electricity is directly generated. Results: higher energy gain than this, same reusable materials at the end. And probably less expensive to build, operate and maintain.
There was a tremendous amount of research being done in the late 70 on this until Ronnie Raygun pulled the plug becuase oil was in such abundance, why worry about alternative programmes.
As for reuse of landfill, you can still use land fill in the MHD process and in fact you can also use the END product of burning coal - and no CO2, NOX, SOX or other pollutants.
My colleagues and I have been working on a "home" unit or regionalised unit that can augment the current distribution systems and then eventually once fully replicated - you will be able to convert the larger facilities to this technology.
@MizuInOz
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishey there, would you be able to send me some informations on the process you mentioned?
Can someone elaborate on the energy balance of the hole process? I mean, how much energy is consumed in producing the plasma, vs. how much energy we get from the turbine? Also, once plasma passes through the turbine, what's its destination? Is it released into the atmosphere is gas form? If so, does anyone know the different gases that will be released?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRusty, what you say is largely true, but there are other considerations such as the methane given off (a greenhouse gas), the eyesore, toxic leachate, and any garbage that may blow off the huge pile and into the water thereby contributing to the Texas sized pile of garbage floating in a gyre in the Pacific Ocean.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAddressed to MizulnOz your comment is very interesting, I have been in the waste industry since the early 70's and participated in NYC local law 14(abloishing apt. house incinerators and replacing same with compaction units. I am interested in following your conception of localized geoplasma technology and look forward to your progress. Key essentials often overlooked by activists and politicians are Practicality and Affordability. If you can address these key issues, I think you should be in line for a Nobel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is an addition to the 11/12/08 comment by Dr. Marshal Greenblatt, Fusion Systems corp. Dr. Ben Eastlund and I proposed the concept for the use of ultra-high temperature plasmas to process garbage in a 1969 report [Eastlund, B. J. & Gough, W. C. (1969, May 15). The Fusion Torch: Closing the Cycle from Use to Reuse, Washington, DC: WASH-1132, Division of Research, United States Atomic Energy Commission.].
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe concept received considerable attention at the time and was published in Scientific American [Gough, William C. and Bernard J. Eastlund (1971, February), The Prospects of Fusion Power, Scientific American, 224 (2) pp. 50-74.] About five years ago Dr. Ben Eastlund and I started to update the fusion torch because of the advances in plasma technology and the pressing need for addressing the build up of wastes. Following Bens death in Dec. 2007 another colleague, Dr. George Miley, at the University of Illinois, and I continued this process. We have recently presented two papers at meetings of the American Nuclear Society [Gough, W.C. & Miley, G. H. (2008). The IEC Fusion-Plasma Torch: A Path for Closing the Materials Cycle, to be published in the Proceedings of the American Nuclear Society 18th Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy, September 28 - October 2, 2008, San Francisco, CA; Miley, G.H., Gough, W. C., & Leon, H. (2008). Large-Scale Hydrogen Production Using a Fusion Torch Process, to be published in the Proceedings of the 2008 American Nuclear Society winter meeting, Reno, NV.
A lay version of the Fusion Torch concept and its implications to society is available on the web without pictures at: http://www.fmbr.org/papers/ecological_sustainability.php. Also available is a version with great artwork by Bob Bourdeaux.
This is an addition to the 11/12/08 comment by Dr. Marshal Greenblatt, Fusion Systems corp. Dr. Ben Eastlund and I proposed the concept for the use of ultra-high temperature plasmas to process “garbage” in a 1969 report [Eastlund, B. J. & Gough, W. C. (1969, May 15). The Fusion Torch: Closing the Cycle from Use to Reuse, Washington, DC: WASH-1132, Division of Research, United States Atomic Energy Commission.].
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe concept received considerable attention at the time and was published in Scientific American [Gough, William C. and Bernard J. Eastlund (1971, February), The Prospects of Fusion Power, Scientific American, 224 (2) pp. 50-74.] About five years ago Dr. Ben Eastlund and I started to update the fusion torch because of the advances in plasma technology and the pressing need for addressing the build up of wastes. Following Ben’s death in Dec. 2007 another colleague, Dr. George Miley, at the University of Illinois, and I continued this process. We have recently presented two papers at meetings of the American Nuclear Society [Gough, W.C. & Miley, G. H. (2008). The IEC Fusion-Plasma Torch: A Path for Closing the Materials Cycle, to be published in the Proceedings of the American Nuclear Society 18th Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy, September 28 - October 2, 2008, San Francisco, CA; Miley, G.H., Gough, W. C., & Leon, H. (2008). Large-Scale Hydrogen Production Using a Fusion Torch Process, to be published in the Proceedings of the 2008 American Nuclear Society winter meeting, Reno, NV.
A lay version of the Fusion Torch concept and its implications to society is available on the web without pictures at: http://www.fmbr.org/papers/ecological_sustainability.php. Also available is a version with great artwork by Bob Bourdeaux.
what is the price of plasma plant which convert gardage in to electricity
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishow much does it cost to build a Plasma plants to vaporize trash and create new energy
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