Trash Into Gas, Efficiently? An Army Test May Tell
By PAUL TULLIS
THERE is an indisputable elegance to the idea of transforming garbage
into fuel, of turning icky, smelly detritus into something valuable.
But big drawbacks have prevented the wholesale adoption of trash-to-gas
technology in the United States: incineration is polluting, and the
capital costs of new plants are enormous. Gasification systems can
expend a tremendous amount of energy to produce a tiny amount of
electricity. Up to this point, it hasn’t seemed worth the trouble.
Mike Hart thinks that he has solved those problems. In a former Air Force hangar outside Sacramento, his company, Sierra Energy, has spent the last several years testing a waste-to-energy system called the FastOx Pathfinder.
The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower
stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction
inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used
syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without
combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which
together are known as syngas, for synthetic gas, and can be burned to
generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel. The FastOx is
now being prepared for delivery to Sierra Energy’s first customer: the
United States Army.
Ethanol has long been promoted as an alternative fuel that increases
energy independence, and federal law requires the use of greater amounts
of it. But most ethanol in this country is produced from corn, and many
people worry that the mandate is pushing up food prices. Ethanol produced from trash — or agricultural waste, as others are trying — would allay such concerns.
Ineos Bio,
a Florida company, announced last month that it had produced ethanol
from gasified wood waste, using a method that it expects to be
commercially viable, and KiOR Inc. will make one million to two million gallons of diesel and gasoline this year from wood waste at its plant in Columbus, Miss., according to Michael McAdams, president of the Advanced Biofuels Association.
Mr. Hart said Sierra Energy’s technology should be complementary with
the Florida company’s; the FastOx turns all municipal waste, not just
wood scraps, into a gas that Ineos Bio could then transform into
ethanol.
The FastOx gasifier is the brainchild of two former engineers at Kaiser
Steel, patented by the grandson of one of them and commercialized by Mr.
Hart. “It’s a modular system that can be dropped into any area,” Mr.
Hart said, “using waste where it’s produced to make electricity where
it’s used.” Once it’s off the ground, he said, “garbage will be a
commodity.”
From concept to construction, the story of the FastOx is of one
fortuitous accident after another. And while Sierra Energy has not yet
proved to be a successful company — it will be a long while before your
garbage is shoveled into a FastOx — its system has become the first
waste-to-energy technology acquired by the Defense Department, which
paid $3 million for it through an environmental technology program. (The
California Energy Commission, which supports renewable energy
development in the state, also gave Sierra $5 million, to cover the
portion of Sierra’s costs that the Pentagon couldn’t.)
The military is looking for ways to reduce its oil consumption, and to
make it easier to supply the front lines with the fuel it uses in all
its vehicles and generators. “These days, the supply lines are in the
battlefield,” said Sharon E. Burke,
the assistant secretary of defense for operational efficiency plans and
programs. “And we consume a lot of fuel, which makes us a big target.”
MIKE HART got into the energy business by way of a train. In 1993, he
bought the Sierra Railroad, a small freight and tourism line in Northern
California. During the California blackouts of 2001, he had an idea:
“As the lights were going out, I realized every one of my locomotives
creates 2.1 megawatts of electricity,” he said — enough to power many hundred homes. “It’s a rolling generator, and inexpensive.”
The train-as-power-generator idea never really left the station, but it
got Mr. Hart thinking about alternative energy. Then, as part of a
settlement after a fuel spill from one of his trains, he promised to convert his trains to nonpolluting biodiesel.
Biodiesel, however, proved hard to find, and Mr. Hart started looking
for new ways to source it. In 2002, he was asked to judge an annual
business plan competition called the Big Bang, at the University of California, Davis. That’s where he met Chris Kasten.
Mr. Kasten came to the competition with an idea to use a modified blast
furnace to turn waste into fuel. His grandfather, Bruce Claflin, a
retired chief industrial engineer at Kaiser Steel in Fontana, Calif.,
had given him the idea.
Kaiser used blast furnaces to make steel, and Mr. Claflin and a
colleague, John Jasbinsek, were tasked with finding “a way to make the
blast furnace more efficient and less polluting,” said Mr. Jasbinsek,
who is now 86.
Like all blast furnaces, Kaiser’s emitted a flue gas out of the top. It
occurred to Mr. Clafin and Mr. Jasbinsek that this gas might have value.
The two came up with the idea of injecting oxygen, instead of the
atmospheric air that steel makers had always used, to create the
chemical reaction that heats the inside of the furnace. This would cut
pollution while raising the energy content of the flue gas — in essence,
giving the steel maker a second product. But pure oxygen made the
system too hot, so they added steam. This gave the furnace a third
product: hydrogen, which can be used to produce electricity in fuel
cells.
After Kaiser decided to close the Fontana plant in 1983, workers were
told to toss all demolition debris into the blast furnace. It was then
that Mr. Jasbinsek and Mr. Claflin realized that the furnace could take
garbage, too. “No matter what they put in, the furnace melted and
gasified it,” Mr. Kasten said. This meant a potential fourth revenue
stream — from taking municipal waste that would otherwise go to
landfills.
When Kaiser wasn’t interested, Mr. Jasbinsek recalled, “we took the idea
to other steel companies, too.” But “nobody gave a damn!” he said. “Now
there are hardly any steel companies left in the U.S.”
Kaiser Steel went bankrupt in 1987, so the idea belonged to Mr.
Jasbinsek and Mr. Claflin. They were nearing retirement, though, so Mr.
Claflin told his grandson about it. (Mr. Claflin died before the idea
could be commercialized.)
Mr. Kasten’s first fruitful step in developing his grandfather’s idea
was meeting with Chris Soderquist, founder of Venture Lab. “When you run
a technology incubator, you see a lot of crazy and half-baked ideas,”
Mr. Soderquist said. But Mr. Kasten’s was different; Mr. Soderquist
could see right away the value of multiple revenue streams.
Gasification is more efficient than incineration and eliminates toxic
byproducts that come from burning trash. But it was especially appealing
from a business point of view because it relied on a proven technology
and used materials in wide abundance: blast furnaces being abandoned as
the American steel industry was collapsing.
“What was compelling from the start,” Mr. Soderquist said, “was
repurposing existing infrastructure into a generator of clean energy,
with a second revenue stream from people paying you to take their
waste.”
Mr. Soderquist helped Mr. Kasten prepare for the Big Bang competition.
“For a grad school business plan competition, it was quite a plan he
presented,” Mr. Soderquist said, and the judges agreed: Mr. Kasten, now
43, won a $2,000 prize.
Mr. Hart, 51, as a competition judge and a serial entrepreneur, was
intrigued. He had started his first business at 12, operating a string
of candy machines in high schools throughout what would become known as
Silicon Valley. Next, while still living at home, he opened a sort of
temp agency for teenagers doing odd jobs. There were a lot of other
businesses from the late 1970s to 1993, and stints as a developer for
Steve Jobs’s company Next, and for Apple. Mr. Hart also did some
consulting until he realized that he would make more money buying
whatever devalued company he had been hired to help, and turning it
around himself. That was when he bought the Sierra Railroad.
Mr. Hart checked out Mr. Kasten’s gasifier and decided to buy the
patents. Then he applied to a Pentagon program established to shepherd
proven concepts to the production stage. Results at the Defense
Department’s testing facility near Sacramento have been promising; after
about four hours, one ton of waste creates enough gas to produce 1,580
kilowatt-hours of electricity, which would power an average home in the
United States for about a month and a half — at one-third the emissions
of coal — and 42 gallons of renewably sourced fuel. And that’s with a
12-ton-a-day gasifier; existing blast furnaces can handle as much as
2,000 tons a day.
Now that the Pentagon is convinced that the FastOx will work as
advertised, the system should be providing electricity later this year
at Fort Hunter Liggett, a training base in Monterey County, Calif., and fuel for vehicles and generators in early 2014.
“California produces 30 million tons of garbage a year,” Mr. Hart said.
“If it decided to turn its waste into clean fuels, at that rate it could
meet all its oil consumption needs and still export more fuel than some
OPEC members.” That is, if the FastOx can do what no other
waste-to-energy gasification technology has done before: take any kind
of trash, in any succession, without additional separation or
preparation.
Sierra plans to license its technology and to sell systems to make
electricity or ethanol from the syngas produced by the FastOx. The first
will be small and cost about $3 million. But Mr. Hart said he expects
to sell larger systems to municipalities and biofuel makers that will go
for much more.
Any waste-to-energy plan, however, must overcome a major hurdle: the
wild inconsistency of the waste stream. “Until you’ve demonstrated that
you can handle it all, nobody’s interested,” Mr. Hart said. “I can
understand it; they’ve heard similar promises before. We’ve got 150
cities, communities and businesses lined up to be Serial No. 2. Nobody
wants to be No. 1.”
NOBODY, that is, except the Pentagon. The Defense Department is the
country’s largest single consumer of energy, spending $15 billion a year
just on fuel.
“The mission drives this,” said Ms. Burke, the assistant defense
secretary, “and the mission is inherently energy-intensive.”
The FastOx could reduce the military’s reliance on oil overseas and the
grid at home. “I have a $24 million-a-year electric bill at Camp
Pendleton” in Southern California, said that Marine base’s commander,
Brig. Gen. Vincent A. Coglianese. “If I can reduce that cost, that’s
more money I can put into training Marines and sailors.”
Ms. Burke added, “Something for military operations has to be really
rugged, deployable, simple to use — all of those things.”
Consultants and municipal sanitation officials who’ve looked at the
FastOx say it meets those criteria. John Conger, the acting deputy under
secretary of defense for installations and the environment, who
oversees management of military bases in the United States, says Sierra
Energy’s technology should provide energy security for the military in
the event of a blackout and provide budget savings as well.
The military’s cost of petroleum, when the costs of transporting and
guarding it are factored in, can run as high as $50 a gallon. Moreover,
about half of United States casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan between
2003 and 2007 were of servicemen and servicewomen moving and protecting
fuel convoys, according to an Army report.
The appeal of Mr. Hart’s Pathfinder system is that it would produce fuel
on site, eliminating the need to truck in fuel to dangerous military
outposts. It would also reduce the need for trash-burning on bases,
which creates pollution and noxious odors that have contributed to
locals’ distaste for the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a
result, United States forces in Afghanistan are working to close burn
pits.
“Waste is a problem,” Ms. Burke said. “So if we could dispose of waste
and create energy at the same time, that would be a silver bullet.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: August 25, 2013
An article last Sunday about a Sierra Energy gasifier system that the Army will use to turn trash into energy referred incorrectly to a product of the system. It is hydrogen and carbon monoxide, together known as “syngas,” for synthetic gas; the system does not produce “synthetic natural gas.” The article also referred imprecisely to Fort Hunter Liggett, a training base in Monterey County, Calif. At more than 165,000 acres, it is not a “small” base.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 1, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/business/trash-into-gas-efficiently-an-army-test-may-tell.html
