BIOFUELS: The Gasification Generation
BACK TO THE FUTURE?
The average American generates 4.43 pounds of garbage every day. As a nation, we tossed out roughly 250 million tons of trash in 2010, from food waste to construction debris to outdated iPhones [source: EPA] and the numbers are climbing. What if we could divert all of that waste from the landfill and convert it into usable energy? Doc Brown did it in BACK TO THE FUTURE — feeding his DeLorean’s cold fusion reactor with banana peels and beer — and thanks to a process called gasification, so can we.
Gasification uses heat and pressure to crack the molecular compounds of almost any carbon-based material into a substance called synthetic gas, or syngas. All around the world, cities are replacing their landfills with gasification plants. In June 2014 the City of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada opened
Enerkem Alberta Biofuels, the first industrial-scale facility to produce biofuels from municipal solid waste, making Edmonton a world leader in sustainable waste management. With this new facility, the City of Edmonton supplies 100,000 tons of sorted municipal waste to be converted into 9.5 million gallons of biofuels and chemicals annually.
Inside the facility, municipal waste (garbage) is sorted by type: compostable organic waste, recyclable material and waste products that would normally be sent to the landfill. Leftovers are shredded into a fine pulp and fed into the gasifier, where super heat — not fire — liquefies the material into carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2), the major elements of syngas. The syngas is funneled through a catalytic converter where the molecules are rearranged to form ethanol and methanol [source: Edmonton Biofuels].
More and more of these plants are popping up to process both wood-based waste and plain old garbage. Looks like the Doc’s DeLorean isn’t so futuristic after all. When millions of tons of trash become millions of gallons of gas, we have another biofuel win for everyone.
Alkane thanks Dave Roos, writing for How Stuff Works for the content of this article.
Alkane Truck Company is currently raising capital on the crowdfunding platform StartEngine. Find out more here: https://www.startengine.com/startup/alkane
