Plasma Technology: Waste to Energy Conversion
Posted: Mon May 07, 2007 11:40 am
http://www.startech.net/Startech is the only publicly traded waste-to-energy plasma arc technology company in the world. They presently have three 5 ton/day installations in operation, with a number of other plants in various stages of implementation. A 200 ton/day plant being built by Startech in Panama will be the largest such plant in the world, and will convert ordinary garbage into hydrogen that can be used in fuel cells to generate electricity or directly as a fuel for combustion. The Panama plant is expected to be operational in 2008. "Waste is not garbage, but a commercially valuable, renewable resource." (StarTech Promotional Video.)
What a fantastic idea. I was onboard with the concepts of biodiesel, but this is exponentially better.
I would like to see our municipal garbage dumps eradicated, not to mention hazardous waste removal. The energy needed is self renewing, so unless we run out of garbage to feed it, it should keep on keepin' on.. The DOE considering it in the case of Ground Zero site clean up.What is Plasma?
Plasma is simply a gas (air) that the Converter ionizes so it becomes an effective electrical conductor and produces a lightning-like arc of electricity that is the source of the intense energy transferred to the waste material as radiant energy. The arc in the plasma plume within the vessel can be as high as 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit ... three times hotter than the surface of the Sun. When waste materials are subjected to the intensity of the energy transfer within the vessel, the excitation of the wastes' molecular bonds is so great that the waste materials' molecules break apart into their elemental components (atoms). It is the absorption of this energy by the waste material that forces the waste destruction and elemental dissociation.
The Plasma Converter is computer controlled, easy to use and operates at normal atmospheric pressure, very safely and quietly.
Popular ScienceIt all sounds far too good to be true. But the technology works. Over the past decade, half a dozen companies have been developing plasma technology to turn garbage into energy. “The best renewable energy is the one we complain about the most: municipal solid waste,” says Louis Circeo, the director of plasma research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It will prove cheaper to take garbage to a plasma plant than it is to dump it on a landfill.” A Startech machine that costs roughly $250 million could handle 2,000 tons of waste daily, approximately what a city of a million people amasses in that time span. Large municipalities typically haul their trash to landfills, where the operator charges a “tipping fee” to dump the waste. The national average is $35 a ton, although the cost can be more than twice that in the Northeast (where land is scarce, tipping fees are higher). And the tipping fee a city pays doesn’t include the price of trucking the garbage often hundreds of miles to a landfill or the cost of capturing leaky methane—a greenhouse gas—from the decomposing waste. In a city with an average tipping fee, a $250-million converter could pay for itself in about 10 years, and that’s without factoring in the money made from selling the excess electricity and syngas. After that break-even point, it’s pure profit.
I'm in.
