BOSTON--To many communities, trash-to-energy means burning garbage. But a handful of companies say they are close to bringing cleaner technology to market for making electricity or ethanol from waste.
At a panel discussion on waste-to-energy at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen East conference here on Tuesday, representatives from four companies detailed their plans to use gasification to convert waste products to usable energy. Some products are ready to be deployed more widely while others are still in the pilot testing phase.
The promise of using municipal solid trash or other waste products for useful energy is tantalizing: it's a renewable resource and reduces the need for methane-emitting landfills or incineration.
But making the technology less expensive, along with resistance from communities over environmental concerns, remain formidable barriers.
"It's a bit of minefield. We all run companies where 40 companies have failed before us," said Bill Davis, the CEO of Ze-Gen, a start-up which has a pilot facility for turning construction debris into electricity.
Workers at Ze-Gen's waste-to-electricity test facility in Bedford, Mass, where construction debris is heated in an oxygen-starved chamber to break the material down into its component elements, including hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
(Credit: Ze-Gen)Representatives from the four companies--Ze-Gen, IST Energy, Enerkem, and Plasco Energy Group--took pains to point out that gasification is different and cleaner than combustion.
In a gasifier, a feedstock like municipal trash is heated at high temperatures and pressure, which breaks down the material into a synthesis gas, which contains hydrogen and carbon monoxide. That synthesis gas, or syngas, can be burned in a commercial turbine to make electricity or heat.
Plasco Energy Group appeared to be furthest along in terms of commercializing the technology. It has a facility in Ottawa, Canada, that handles 100 tons a day of municipal garbage left over after recyclable items have been removed. The company plans to open a manufacturing facility this summer to produce more of these 100-ton modules and is in discussion with communities in California, British Columbia, France and the U.K., according to CEO Rod Bryden.
Bryden hopes to replicate the model in Ottawa where the waste-to-energy facility is sited in the city and the community holds the company to high environmental standards for air quality and waste water disposal.
After creating a syngas, its equipment can separate residual materials and turn them into products, so that 99 percent of the input is used. Left-over solids, for example, can be mixed to make asphalt or other construction equipment, Bryden said.
"One of the things about garbage (as a feedstock) is that it's where the people are and that's where the energy is used," he said. Wind and solar, by contrast need to have transmissions constructed. "The first barrier to overcome is environmental (such as air quality). If you can't get by that, you won't be able to get into business."
Costs, too
Enerkem uses a gasification process as well, but makes ethanol rather than electricity. Last year it signed a contract with Edmonton in Canada to use municipal trash which will be converted into ethanol. It also has a demonstration plant in Westbury, Canada to use utility poles as a feedstock.
It plans to open a facility in Montreal, which took only four months to be permitted. By contrast, the last incinerator in the U.S. was built in 1996, according to Vincent Chornet, the CEO of Enerkem.
Next week, the company will announce plans for another waste-to-ethanol facility in Mississippi, he said.
Permitting, however, remains a formidable barrier, said Stu Haber, the CEO of IST Energy, which has developed a waste-treatment machine that can fit onto a flatbed truck. It's aimed at hospitals, prisons, and other buildings that generate at least two tons of trash a day.
Regulations for waste-to-energy were not written for gasification technology, which means that state agencies don't know how to deal with IST Energy's product, which the company intends to start manufacturing this summer.
"If we can't (get through) restrictions in government agencies, we'll have to go out business and it will make it harder for the industry," Haber said.
Also, within communities there's opposition from people who associate waste-to-energy with incineration, noted Ze-Gen's Davis.
On a technical level, making sure that a gasification can produce enough energy to be a replacement for fossil fuels, such as natural gas, still remains a challenge. Ze-Gen's business model, for example, is to get a high-quality fuel that can replace natural gas at a power plant facility. But with falling fossil fuel prices, the target is harder.
"Our competitor effectively is landfill most of the time so the biggest long-term issue is economics," said Ze-Gen's Davis.
Updated 9:45 a.m. PT with clarification on Enerkem's different facilities.
Even after a massive jolt from the U.S. government for green technologies, investors are tempering their expectations.
Consulting company KPMG on Tuesday is expected to release results of a survey that reflects the conflicted feelings of many venture capitalists.
The societal forces toward clean energy--including energy security and climate change--continue to gain momentum. But the financial crisis has hit the clean-energy industry so hard that even the recently passed stimulus plan cannot completely reverse its course.
"There is no doubt that the green-tech sector remains an attractive investment area, but the lack of available credit and the difficult economic environment has investors operating in a cautiously optimistic fashion," Brian Hughes, KPMG partner, said in a statement.
KPMG said it expects the level of green-tech venture investment will grow in 2009, one of the few technology sectors that will. But the survey showed that investors and entrepreneurs are far less optimistic than they were last year.
In September, 93 percent of survey respondents said they expected investment to increase. In a similar poll in February, the percentage of people who thought green-tech investment would rise slipped to 53 percent, with 26 percent forecasting a decrease.
Data from the survey also reflects the changing attitudes toward government involvement in energy technology.
Just over 90 percent of respondents expect that federal funding for green tech will increase and 93 percent said that there will be more "public/private partnership activity."
At the MIT Energy Conference on Saturday, some speakers said that government policies need to change significantly for the green-tech industry to scale beyond niche status.
For example, Ford Motor's director of sustainable business strategies said that the automaker is increasingly looking to collaborate on advanced technology development, calling the U.S. government the "biggest venture capitalist out there."
Also at the conference, Lux Research President Matthew Nordan said that there would need to be a "fairly radical rethink" of utility regulations for storage to become widely used, which would allow for more use of wind and solar power.
Investors queried by KPMG said they expected that renewable energy, such as solar and wind, as well as energy storage and efficiency will be the areas to receive the most funding this year.
FORT BAKER, Calif.--Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla has a message for and about the clean-tech industry: it's not about style, it's about substance.
San Francisco, for example, likes to show off its solar-panel installation at the Moscone convention center, he said. "But it's a foggy city," Khosla quipped here during a talk Tuesday at the GoingGreen confab. Toyota's Prius hybrid may be a hit in Hollywood, but he said, it's less carbon efficient than biofuel-powered cars and likely won't penetrate markets in India and China.
"The Prius sells well, but so do Gucci bags," he said.
Vinod Khosla, head of Khosla Ventures
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET News)Finally, he'd like people to stop paying attention to the musician Sheryl Crow's public message about using only one square of toilet paper. "This is about real stuff, not fashion."
"The new green is about engines, lighting, appliances, batteries, gasoline diesel," Khosla said. "It's not about clean tech, it's about main tech. If you're going to find climate change solutions, it's got to be about main tech."
Khosla delivered a keynote speech on the first full day of the Always On GoingGreen conference, a three-day event focused on clean technology topics. Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems who's risen to green-tech fame by investing in companies through his firm Khosla Ventures, spent a good portion of his talk pooh-poohing technologies he believes won't work in the long term.
For example, he criticized investor T. Boone Pickens' plan for natural gas-powered cars and targeting only a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions within 10 years.
"This planet needs at least 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel. I just don't think it makes sense," Khosla said.
On another front, Khosla said he likes nuclear as a renewable energy source, but it takes 15 years to try out new nuclear technology.
He also estimated that hybrids--versus cars that run on cellulosic fuel, E85--have a larger carbon footprint per mile driven. "It's not that I don't like hybrids--we'll probably look for new investments. But if you're going to change this business, we need to improve batteries," he said.
He said that the Tata Nano has sold millions in India, and the Honda Civic Hybrid has sold in thousands. "How do we make this car (the Nano) low carbon at $2,500? The technologies not only have to be fashionable but they have to be relevant at scale," he said.
So what's the answer? He said his firm is concentrated on investments in energy efficiency, biofuels, electricity, and new materials. For example, it has money in lighting technology for home and outdoors. It is investing in materials like water infrastructure tech, bioplastics, and cement that can sequester carbon. It is also backing companies working on energy-efficient engines, such as EcoMotors.
In the last six months, he has also proposed that the government or public interest groups adopt a method called "Claw" for measuring biofuels, giving each a rating much like an LEED rating for buildings. He said in an interview that he's tried to talk to the Natural Resources Defense Council and others to take up the cause.
"What I have proposed is that we measure biofuels with a rating--a carbon rating, a land rating, air quality rating, and water quality rating. (Claw) measures all environmental impacts of biofuels and puts a scientific basis about measuring this industry," he said.
"Once we have such a measurement, we can focus on the right fuel," he added.
- prev
- 1
- next
