Synthetic gasoline? Syndiesel from coal? Oil-based fuels from algae, grasses or waste grease? Single alcohols like ethanol? What about higher mixed alcohol fuels?
Nice people usually avoid public discussion of sensitive subjects like sex, politics and religion.
What other topics do people avoid talking about? How about their trash? It’s not a sensitive topic, but it gets ignored as a topic nonetheless. Perhaps because Americans so far have few options for how their trash gets disposed of.
There’s no value there, so people don’t talk about trash. What would be the point, right?
What if there was a point to discussing trash, like money, jobs, new businesses and a cleaner environment?
Waste-to-energy plants generate enough electricity to supply almost three million households. But, providing electricity is not the major advantage of waste-to-energy plants. In fact, it costs more to generate electricity at a waste-to-energy plant than it does at a coal, nuclear, or hydropower plant. The main benefit of incineration of waste is to reduce the waste that gets buried at the landfill!
Plasma gasification clearly makes greater environmental sense. What’s more, it makes economic sense as well because plasma gasification can enable the production of a wide variety of biofuels.
GIMO: Garbage In, Money Out
How interested are you in seeing your trash get processed into biofuels by new green energy businesses in your town? Interested enough to talk trash with people you know?
Ask a smart person what we should do with America’s trash and you’ll probably get a blank stare. Followed by a “what do you mean?” When you find the smart person momentarily at a loss for words, it’s a good opportunity to share Bioroot Energy’s vision for helping Americans build new businesses to monetize trash and biomass, and clean up their local environments.
Almost nobody on the street knows about plasma gasification or its massive potential to change the way we manage solid waste. But word is getting out and interest is increasing.
Meanwhile, major magazines such as Newsweek run articles such as How Our Purchases Affect The Environment with nary a mention of how we dispose of trash, or how we create energy, or its impact on the environment.
America has its focus on the marketplace for buying and selling stuff. We don’t yet focus on developing a marketplace for converting all that used up stuff to energy after it has served its useful life.
If you don’t think all the stuff around you will end up in a landfill, burned, buried or get carried out to sea, you need to learn more about archaeology.
Most Americans probably don’t yet see trash disposal as a problem to be solved, much less as a magnificent opportunity to develop localized green energy businesses that will fundamentally improve the way we manage and dispose of our solid waste and excess non-crop, non-food biomass.
Think about it from the marketer’s perspective. How to solve a national problem that isn’t widely viewed as a problem?
Taking out the trash is so deeply entrenched in the American way of life that the thought of anyone using your area’s solid waste and excess biomass to generate biofuels and getting paid for their effort might seem like science fiction. Or wishful thinking.
How about neither of the above? The technology to create biofuel from trash and other stuff nobody wants is ready to go and set to be deployed widely in municipal settings in coming years. It’s only a matter of money, time, and place. So the question is, exactly who will plan, develop and own these facilities, and reap the rewards?
America needs all the clean alternative energy it can make. And America needs to become more efficient with lifecycle management of trash or get buried or poisoned by it eventually as well. Why not combine the two to form a whole waste to energy solution that actually works for the good of everybody and not just somebody?
When America’s waste makers (that’s all of us) learn to clean up after ourselves in a sustainable, non-polluting, carbon-negative way and, better still, get paid for it, our children will have a brighter future. Not until.
If you don’t think this topic is important, do some reading and find out why improving waste management might be one of the most important undertakings of our time. Humanity’s future and the condition of our environment rests on our ability to innovate a baseline clean energy solution from trash that is non-polluting, carbon-negative, and viable.
Think about what turning your town’s trash and garbage into clean energy could mean, eventually:
The end of landfills for everything we toss that has no further practical use.
The end of groundwater contamination from leaking landfills.
The end of methane ventilation from toxic landfills nationwide.
The beginning of new businesses and jobs in the green energy sector.
The beginning of an American rennaissance in alternative energy manufacturing.
The beginning of a new era of doing the right thing with our trash: gasifying it!
The emergence of America’s cities and towns as energy partners and producers.
What should we do about the millions upon millions of beetle-killed trees in the West, especially in Montana? While people debate the merits and feasibility of taking action, one major aspect of the discussion has yet to really be discussed: biofuels.
From the Missoulian article:
“Even if we had the infrastructure and logging community we used to have, we couldn’t get this all off the ground,” Siedlitz said. “Thinning is just negative logging. It doesn’t pay for itself. If we could do something with the biomass so it was profitable to take it off, that might be something.”
We agree, “that” might be something! And “that” might even pay for itself and then some!
We are pleased that Bioroot Energy is ranking well in search returns among the major search engines. For example, a search for “bio trash to energy” on Bing ranked this site as #1. We’ve only been live for a couple of months, so that’s good news. It’s one of many signs we’re seeing that people all over the world are taking waste to energy subjects seriously enough to spend sometimes hours reading what’s here, at least from the traffic signals we’re getting.
Converting waste to energy is a no-brainer, it’s innovate, exciting, and most importantly, it’s the right thing to do. What’s not to like about converting your crap to energy except the price of entering the market?
But we’ve also noticed that most people who visit only read about what we’re doing and don’t comment, don’t sign up or become directly involved. Being widely ignored is not unanticipated. We live in an age where freely consuming found information on the Internet is just as common as consuming water.
We realize you are busy. But unlike consuming all the water you can handle, consuming information about trash to energy and not digesting it and getting any value from the exercise can lead to information overload, analysis paralysis, gee-whizitis, whodathunkitis, and all kinds of bad stuff.
Like the inability to separate the wheat from the chaff. Like the ability to step over a diamond and settle for another turd. Is this what you really want from the information you read?
When will you have had enough information and be ready to act on any of the information you’ve consumed? What do you need to read here or be offered to get you involved? Are you a trash maker? Why sure. Okay, tell us how you feel about your trash and what is currently done with it: landfilling. Are you an engineer with expertise in any of the fields we’re involved with in establishing gasfiication facilities? Please become a voice here and give weight and credibility to our story. Are you a biomass stakeholder with no good place to put it? Tell us what you want to do with it.
3 Billion in Renewable Energy funding from Obama administration holds great promise. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) provides energy incentives for both individuals and businesses.
Do you see trash as a renewable energy resource or a mere nuisance to be tossed into a trash can and promptly disposed of? It is both, and all you need do is look at what you and your family throw away each week to realize it. Where does it currently go? The landfill? Does that seem like the best solution to you?
How about nature’s excess biomass—the leaves, the yard/lawn clippings, the branches, barks, needles, and small diameter trees from forest thinning projects? How much more renewable a resource is there? Where does this biomass normally go, currently? Up in smoke or to a landfill?
Takeaway: No other energy resource is more renewable or sustainable than the bounty of nature’s excess biomass, or our country’s near endless stream of trash. Converting it to valuable fuels is the right thing to do. Plasma conversion of trash to energy offers a giant step forward for America, and Americans need to take it soon or we’ll bequeath a thoroughly trashed environment to the next generation.
We’re buried in government debt. We’re being buried with trash. The economy is on life support. How dire does our situation need to become for you to take the waste to energy issue and opportunity personally?
1 ton of plasma converted trash and woody biomass can generate 110-125 gallons of ethanol, methanol or other alcohol fuel. How many tons of trash per day does your town dump or burn? How much lost annual revenue is that at approximately $2.25 a gallon?
This year’s July 4th festivities were a bit muted. There really isn’t much to celebrate, other than being free Americans. And we are still free even if we are impoverished. We’re free to make bold moves to improve our quality of life. And we’re free to do nothing if that’s what we want. But our children will pay the price of our dereliction to do what is right for our country, our natural environment, and good for American business.
With freedom comes responsibility and sacrifice. If you’re serious about making a difference in this bioenergy arena, be prepared to work hard and do a lot of evangelizing.
Robert Rapier has worked on cellulosic ethanol, butanol production, oil refining, natural gas production, and gas-to-liquids (GTL). He grew up in Oklahoma, and received a Master’s in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University.
What does he think about gasification’s possibilities?
“Readers may know that I am a big fan of gasification over the long haul. Whether the approach described here turns out to be the right one or not, I think gasification makes far more sense than some of the renewable paths we have headed down. I believe 20 years from now we will be doing commercial biomass gasification for heat and power. I don’t believe we will be making commercial quantities of cellulosic ethanol or algal biofuels.”
It’s July 4th, 2009 and America is staggering under crushing debt, mounting unemployment, and a truly awful business and investment environment. So preoccupied with just paying our bills and keeping our heads above water, America’s need for greater “independence” from foreign oil will remain elusive unless there is a massive effort to leverage all forms of alternative energy, including waste to energy.
Being an American citizen shouldn’t mean taking our independence and high standards of living for granted and asking what our country can do for us when things look like they’re falling apart. In taking up this waste-to-energy crusade, I’m doing what I can for my friends, my community and my country—and everyone else in America should, too. Every American can play a role in this revolution!
America needs to step up and be the first country on earth to rollout plasma gasification on a nationwide scale. Or risk the country’s future by doing nothing to convert one of our most plentiful and under-utilized resources—trash and biomass from nature—to energy. We need jobs, green businesses, and a cleaner environment. We need efficiencies across the board that simply aren’t possible from landilling or incineration of trash and biomass.
Trash to energy is the key to unlocking America’s energy future.
The one major waste item that plasma gasification and all other forms of commercial waste remediation can’t do is convert radioactive materials to inert materials and synthetic gas. It’s a shame, because it’s turning out that radioactivity is literally everywhere, and in much greater amounts than previously believed.
That’s right, America: We’re actively dumping low-level radioactive waste into landfills across the country, mainly because it’s not prohibited!
This is another blockbuster piece of news about why landfilling is such bad business.
In two short years, the Northwest has gone from biofuels boom to biofuels bust.
The boom began in August 2007, when Imperium Renewables opened a 100 million-gallon-a-year biodiesel plant near Grays Harbor, Wash. A month later, Pacific Ethanol opened a 40 million-gallon corn ethanol plant in Boardman. In June 2008, Cascade Grain opened a 113 million-gallon corn ethanol plant in Clatskanie.
Encouraged by tax breaks and Oregon and Washington standards designed to require biofuels’ use, the companies promised environmental benefits on an industrial scale, a quantum leap from smaller-scale producers making fuel from cooking grease and Northwest crops. Nearly 30 more projects were under discussion.
Americans are developing solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal projects at a brisk pace, at least wherever they’re feasible. What about the slow process of developing America’s trash to energy projects?
We (lay people, not waste management professionals) are not yet discussing ways to create clean energy from readily available sources of municipal solid waste and woody biomass in our own home towns. Why?
What does this news mean for small bioenergy startups? Big waste management players are interested in plasma gasification. But they’ll proceed cautiously.
Waste Management, InEnTec form joint venture to develop, operate plasma gasification facilities
Reposted from Biomass Magazine May 21, 2009, at 1:30 p.m. CST
Waste Management Inc. and InEnTec LLC today announced the formation of S4 Energy Solutions LLC, a joint venture to develop, operate and market plasma gasification facilities using InEnTec’s Plasma Enhanced Melter technology. The joint venture is expected to process waste from the country’s increasingly segmented commercial and industrial waste streams to produce a range of renewable energy and environmentally beneficial fuels and industrial products as well as to generate electricity.
Link to press release: http://www.biomassmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=2727
Bioroot Energy clean fuel facilities will produce ENVIROLENE® 138 octane higher mixed alcohol fuel.
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Ten Million People
