Editor's note: This is the first in a series of articles discussing how people in the tech industry are working with or around federal and state governments.
NEW BEDFORD, Mass.--Bill Davis has the unenviable job of selling people on the benefits of garbage.
Six years ago, Davis, the president and CEO of Boston-based Ze-gen developed high-tech tools to measure the effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns. Now, the 52-year-old entrepreneur can talk at length about waste: the amount of waste Americans produce (over 250 million tons a year), the energy content of different types of waste streams, the character of waste in India and other countries.
It's a quest to reinvent people's relationship with waste. Ze-gen has raised nearly $30 million in funding from venture capitalists, a state-run fund, and a Middle East industrial conglomerate. In September, the company opened a demonstration facility that converts woody debris from construction sites into usable energy through gasification. But like many energy start-ups, Ze-gen hasn't yet landed its first big customer. Suffice to say, financial success still eludes Davis and the company's investors.
Complicating matters is U.S. energy policy. The Department of Energy under Obama has been a boon to green technologies of all kinds, pumping billions into developing plug-in auto battery manufacturing, the so-called smart grid, and potentially disruptive energy research. Even with all the interest in promoting energy entrepreneurship, though, Ze-gen's "advanced waste gasification" is something of an orphan in Washington, where there's already a long line of energy lobbyists.
"The problem is nobody really cares. The Department of Energy is primarily concerned with technologies that can deliver a quadrillion units of energy and we're not one of them. We're not solar, not wind, not clean coal, and not ethanol," Davis said from the control room at Ze-gen's facility in New Bedford, Mass. "It's easy to have a technology category that basically falls through the cracks of the traditional funding mechanism."
If Ze-gen does fall through the cracks, it won't be for lack of trying. Davis took nearly 20 trips to Washington D.C. in the past year to meet with staffers from members of Congress and pitch waste, along with other types of biomass, as a form of renewable energy. In an April trip, a group of New England entrepreneurs and investors traveled en masse, squeezing in about 20 meetings in one day in an attempt to influence the House energy and climate bill.
Back home, the state government has been supportive by providing the permits to build Ze-gen's demonstration and pilot facilities. In addition to promoting energy technologies, the state is eager to revitalize the New Bedford area on the southern coast of Massachusetts, a region looking for new industries to replace the jobs lost by declining fishing and manufacturing industries.
But it's not all smooth sailing there either: Ze-gen is fighting a proposed state regulation that would ban construction and demolition debris--the waste stream Ze-gen wants to mine for energy--for use in other types of waste-to-energy plants. The company has lobbied, unsuccessfully, to qualify for renewable energy certificates, a system of attaching a premium for electricity generated from clean sources. Consumers who install solar panels or wind turbines, for example, get a stream of revenue from these certificates, which provide an incentive to use renewable energy.
Getting a helping hand from the DOE or the Massachusetts Statehouse won't necessarily make or break Ze-gen. But favorable policies sure would help. A financial incentive, in the form of a tax break or subsidy, would make Ze-gen's technology that much more attractive and the return on investment more predictable for any would-be customer. Right now, industry's only incentive is to use the cheapest form of energy possible, but policies that encouraged low-carbon technologies, for example, could lead them to consider alternatives.
Steel in the ground
For an entrepreneur schooled in the traditional high-tech scene of software coders and enterprise customers, the change to energy can be dramatic--and difficult. But Davis has adjusted, says Nick d'Arbeloff, president of the New England Clean Energy Council.
d'Arbeloff, who also migrated from high-tech to energy after the dot-com bust, notes that in 25 years in the software business he himself had little professional concern with what went on in Washington. But navigating policymakers and regulators is required in the energy business. Rather than try to push his agenda on lawmakers in the hopes of "shoving the appropriate clause in a statute," Davis has calmly argued why it's logical to favor his technology, said d'Arbeloff.
"Bill's an incredibly even keel guy," said d'Arbeloff. "Impacting the process is a pretty tough row to hoe, but he's brought this quiet tenacity to Washington because he knows it takes a heck of a long time to achieve things."
Another day at the office. Bill Davis at Ze-gen's demo facility in New Bedford, Mass.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)Persistence has been needed on the technology side as well. When he started Ze-gen, Davis started with the idea of using liquid metal to gasify waste and hired a handful of experts in the field. But in five and a half years of development, engineers have had to make a number of significant technical changes, often through trial and error. The company was also sued for alleged patent infringement but settled earlier this year. Davis can't comment on the record about the suit but says the episode didn't slow Ze-gen down significantly.
If Davis is calm and methodical in his business dealings, he's not afraid to speak his mind. During a conference panel earlier this year with other waste-to-energy CEOs, he was blunt about the industry's lousy track record, calling it "a bit of a minefield. We all run companies where 40 companies have failed before." He's not particularly effusive about government bureaucrats, either, saying the government is "particularly bad at being a VC (venture capitalist)."
But he also has a sense of humor and seems legitimately interested in making a contribution to the world's energy and waste problems. In late November, Davis gave me a tour of Ze-gen's waste gasification plant. As we said goodbye, I looked over at the plant and searched for words to describe the experience. "It's..."
"It's different," Davis chimed in with a smile before hopping into his Prius and driving off.
Different it is. Walking into Ze-gen's demonstration facility has the feel of walking into a giant Rube Goldberg science experiment. The core gasifier--a long steel vessel--fills about half of a barn-size room. The additional equipment piles two stories high, with an automated feeding system dropping wood through a chute from above, huge pipes snaking around the top of the unit, and a series of shiny machines to "scrub" the outcoming gas before it's vented through the ceiling.
The plant is located adjacent to a garbage transfer center, where waste from different sources, including paper that can be recycled, is sorted and processed. Ze-gen's primary interest is a waste stream called construction and demolition debris which, once ground up, looks something like wood chip mulch. As the system works around high heat, it was a balmy 80 degrees inside even on a cold night with the doors open.
At the beginning of the process, the waste feedstock is dropped into the gasifier, which houses a bath of molten copper kept at over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. In a gasification chamber, the amount of oxygen is restricted so material doesn't burn and produce carbon dioxide. Instead, the material breaks down into its elemental components in the form of a gas, mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The "syngas" that comes out of this process can be burned to make electricity or to create heat, much like natural gas is used.
Being a start-up, it's had to make adjustments on the business model a few times. Originally, Davis envisioned Ze-gen's plants would be co-located with trash-handling stations and supply electricity to the grid. Now, it's seeking corporations looking for an alternative distributed energy product. A manufacturer, for example, that produces lots of waste is a potential customer if it's looking to reduce its waste-handling cost and find a less carbon-intensive way to make power and heat on-site. Because the technology can reduce carbon emissions compared to other on-site power and heat systems, it could help corporations comply with oncoming carbon or other environmental regulations, Davis said.
Davis versus Goliath
Policymakers may not be conversant in gasification technology, but interest is perking up at the municipal level. A number of communities are considering waste gasification as an alternative to incinerators, which face public opposition, according to Ted Siegler, a principal at DSM Environmental Services in Windsor, Vt., which authored a report on the potential energy in construction debris.
In theory, waste gasification diverts waste from landfills, which give off the potent greenhouse gas methane as garbage decomposes. The technology is also flexible in that it can produce electricity, heat, or a liquid fuel such as ethanol. But is it a cleaner alternative to incinerators? Not necessarily, said Siegler. "Gasification is one of those technologies people are looking at, but I think the data really aren't in (because) there aren't enough full-scale operating plants anywhere in the world to adequately judge what the emissions are going to be at full scale," he said.
The picture here is familiar to many energy start-ups. The incumbent technology has a long, well understood track record, which means that breaking into the business with an alternative process--be it electricity from solar cells or heat from biomass--is tough because the incumbent technology has the benefits of scale and cost.
This is where policy can play a role, either by creating incentives to, say, reduce air pollutants or favor domestic industries. In Ze-gen's case, the rules for what qualifies as a renewable energy source are not even sorted out yet. As a result, waste gasification projects will likely move along on a case-by-case basis, as state regulators try to sort out the economic and environmental profile of the technology, Siegler said.
Davis' next lobbying effort is educating policymakers and environmental advocacy groups on the environmental benefits of diverting waste from landfills and using it for energy, which he says make it a clean fuel on balance. He's more comfortable calling himself a capitalist than an environmentalist, but he clearly has the green-energy bug: he recently installed a very large 10-kilowatt solar array on his garage.
If Ze-gen's Davis has strong opinions on the need to reduce waste and find alternative fuels, he's not counting on any hand-outs from the state or Washington. A number of energy start-ups have been given a lease on life by government-funded loans or grants for demonstration projects. That's extremely important in energy because, often, venture capitalists simply aren't equipped to finance expensive pilot plants, and project finance companies shy away from new technology risk.
Still, Davis is confident that things are going in the right direction at Ze-gen. During an interview, he hinted the company was close to signing a partnership with a global corporation that would help "legitimize" its technology in the real world after six years of development. He's learned how to play the game in Washington, but he's more focused on technical progress and commercial acceptance, even if it's by small steps.
"My view is that this is the hard part right now. We've taken a bunch of small steps and now we're going to build something bigger. That's the leap because it's at scale," he said. "Is there technology risk? Yeah, because we don't have a five-ton unit built. Is there a lot less technology risk than two years ago? You bet, considerably less."
General Electric on Tuesday said that it has reached an agreement to deploy its coal gasification technology in China, a move the company says will advance underground storage of carbon dioxide.
The energy giant announced a set of agreements in a ceremony in Beijing, including deals for GE's high-speed rail and hybrid locomotive engines. The activity comes the same day that China and the U.S. announced a number of energy-related research initiatives in coal, electric vehicles, and smart-grid technologies.
(Credit:
General Electric)
GE and coal power plant operator Shenhua Group signed a memorandum of understanding to create a joint venture to build plants that use GE's coal gasification products. They projected that a definitive agreement would be done by the first half of next year.
Coal gasification, already used in dozens of facilities, is cleaner than the traditional coal-fired process used in power plants because pollutants can be removed during power generation, according to the Department of Energy. Gasification is a thermo-chemical process where coal or other carbon-based feedstocks are treated under high heat and pressure with steam so that they break down into what's called syngas, which contains hydrogen and carbon monoxide. That syngas is then burned to run an electricity turbine.
In the planned projects in China, GE and Shenhua expect to build integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) facilities in China, including a commercial-scale plant that separates out carbon dioxide for underground storage.
Because the U.S. and China rely heavily on coal for power generation, policy makers say that carbon capture and storage at coal plants is an important technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants.
The U.S. Trade Development Agency will said it will fund the "initial steps" toward a plant in China based on GE technology.
The president of GE's Power and Water business, Steve Bolze, said in a statement that additional plants with coal gasification and carbon storage are needed to scale up the industry and lower costs.
Municipal trash giant Waste Management on Thursday created a joint venture that will turn waste into energy using technology that it says is cleaner than incinerators.
S4 Energy Solutions is a joint venture which will use plasma gasification technology from InEnTec of Bend, Ore., to build distributed energy systems. Waste Management financed the creation of the venture, marking the first time that the trash collector has invested in gasification technology, said Senior Vice President Joseph Vaillancourt.
The new company plans to build distributed energy systems that use separated industrial waste as a "feedstock." For example, the company plans to design systems that can turn medical waste into electricity at hospitals, said Jeffrey Surma, the president and CEO of S4 Energy Solutions.
There are a number of mostly small companies that are developing trash-to-energy systems around gasification. One company, Enerkem, on Wednesday passed the environmental regulatory process and won approval to build a facility to turn municipal solid trash into ethanol and chemicals in Edmonton, Alberta.
Rather than burn trash, gasification heats the material at very high temperatures until it breaks down and produces a synthesis gas, or syngas. That syngas can be burned in a natural gas turbine, which is considered a relatively clean way to make electricity. S4 Energy Solutions said that it can also make ethanol, other liquid fuels, or potentially hydrogen.
The InEnTec product has a process for cleaning the syngas. Initial tests show that the level of environmental pollutants dioxins and furens released is low, Surma said.
(Credit:
InEnTech)
"The emissions from a power generating facility would be far better than EPA requirements, comparable if not better than a power generator operating on natural gas," he said, adding that the company hopes to have customers later this year.
The technology was originally developed in the early 1990s at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Surma said.
S4 Energy's planned gasification systems won't replace incinerators but they do provide an option for on-site energy generation. Waste Management will provide ancillary equipment, such as sorting, to create a full waste-to-energy system, Vaillancourt said.
SOMERSET, Mass.--When it comes to covering green technologies, the color can sometimes be black as coal.
On Monday I drove to Southern Massachusetts to visit GreatPoint Energy's $37 million Mayflower Clean Energy Center, a demonstration plant for converting coal to natural gas. Built down the road from the state's largest coal plant at the mouth of the Taunton River, the plant started producing natural gas last month and is now gathering data to optimize the operation.
(Credit:
GreatPoint Energy)
As a technology reporter, it's fascinating to see the energy industry's version of "hardware"--a 200-foot-high reactor, silos holding thousands of pounds of feedstock, and all manner of pipes of valves. I also got to wear a hardhat.
Most people associate green tech with renewable energy--sun, wind, biomass, geothermal. In reality, a lot of energy technology is aimed at making conventional fuels cleaner, which is exactly GreatPoint Energy's mission: to convert dirty coal into cleaner-burning natural gas and to bury carbon dioxide emissions underground.
From a business perspective, GreatPoint Energy is one of many green-tech start-ups taking those first steps from labs to commercialization--a precarious transition that few have been able to make. The project itself is a test case for some potentially significant energy technologies--gasification and underground storage of carbon dioxide.
Gasification, which appears to be undergoing a quiet resurgence in energy, is being used to turn many different feedstocks--coal, biomass, and even municipal trash--into a gas that can later be burned for heat or electricity. Whether gasification technologies qualify for "clean energy" government incentives is still unclear, but backers say that it's a cleaner process than burning.
Successful storage of carbon dioxide, meanwhile, is one of the keys to making coal less polluting. The idea of so-called clean coal is to make electricity with coal, while removing pollutants and storing carbon dioxide underground at a power generation plant.
Chemistry class
GreatPoint Energy's hydromethanization process treats coal with steam, mixes it with a catalyst, and then puts that mixture into a gasifier--essentially a 200-foot-tall metal tube under high heat and pressure.
Inside the gasifier, the feedstock breaks down into different gases and the solid material collects at the bottom. GreatPoint Energy engineers are tuning the process to generate and separate methane, the primary component of natural gas, and carbon dioxide.
The natural gas can be shipped in existing pipelines and used for heating or to make electricity.
What about the carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas? GreatPoint Energy's plans call for building plants in areas, such as Wyoming, where there are both coal and existing oil and gas wells. Injecting CO2 into these wells lets drillers extract more from wells, while keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere. Otherwise, company executives envision using underground geological formations like salt caverns to store the CO2.
Using existing scrubbing equipment, GreatPoint can remove other pollutants, including mercury, nitrogen, and sulfur. An important facet to its test facility is finding methods for recuperating the catalyst and those pollutants, which can be sold for other uses such as ammonia fertilizer.
Steel in the ground: the feedstock-handling equipment at GreatPoint Energy's coal-to-natural gas demo plant.
(Credit: GreatPoint Energy)The company's analysis found that it can produce natural gas with a lower carbon footprint than extracting natural gas from the ground, assuming a carbon storage site can be found. Its financial target is making gas at between $4 and $5 per million British thermal units (MMBtu), which is in the range of today's prices but lower than natural gas prices before the global recession hit.
At the facility on a piece of land called Brayton Point, the company plans to spend the next several months fine-tuning the process to produce the desired gases and to deal with different qualities of coal, which vary greatly.
Next stop: China
As a company, GreatPoint Energy has gotten a fair amount of attention. It attracted renowned venture capital company Kleiner Perkins as one of its first investors, and a $115 million investment from a collection of energy corporation companies was the largest green-tech investment in 2007.
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick played a key role in getting its demonstration facility sited and quickly approved. It took just 18 months to build and get its plant online.
Its next project is to open a larger pilot facility in China at a coal-fired power plant with Datang Huanyin Electric Power, one of the biggest polluters on the planet. "If we can show (Datang) that they can make more money being clean rather than dirty, then we can make a real impact," says GreatPoint Energy CEO Andrew Perlman.
These facilities aren't cheap: the pilot plant in China will cost between $100 million and $200 million, financed primarily by Datang. A full-scale operation would cost $1 billion to build, a reminder of how vital it is for start-ups to get access to large amounts of capital, either through equity partnerships with large corporations or government loans.
Back home in Massachusetts, the company is seeking to build expertise in the core technologies behind its process--carbon capture, gasification, and mineralization, through a partnership with the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said Chief Financial Officer Daniel Goldman.
"The concept is to create a 'green line,' a research and development corridor down here," Goldman said. "There's been a lot of research in these fields but very little commercialization."
If your mission is to make coal less polluting, China is a good place to start.
GreatPoint Energy, a start-up with technology to convert coal to cleaner-burning natural gas, expects to open a demonstration plant in China in three years.
The plant would cost between $100 million and $200 million and be located at a coal-fired power plant operated by Datang Huanyin Electric Power. Most of the financing for the plant will come from Datang, one of the biggest single polluters on the planet, according to GreatPoint Energy CEO Andrew Perlman.
GreatPoint Energy's pilot facility in Somerset, Mass.
(Credit: GreatPoint Energy)Although GreatPoint Energy's business is focused on fossil fuels, the company was founded by environmentalists intent on tackling climate change.
In its demonstration plant in China, GreatPoint's technology will convert 1,500 tons of coal a day into natural gas, according to Perlman.
China is rapidly constructing more domestically supplied coal plants to meet swelling electricity demand, contributing to air pollution problems and rapid growth in the country's carbon emissions.
"If we can show (Datang) that they can make more money being clean rather than dirty, then we can make a real impact," says Perlman.
GreatPoint's hydromethanization process, being used in pilot facilities in Massachusetts and Illinois, passes coal or other carbon-heavy feedstock through a chute where it is treated with a metal catalyst and steam.
The material is then gasified in a chamber, which creates carbon dioxide and methane, the main ingredient in natural gas. The methane is then cleaned and the catalyst recuperated for use again. The process can work with petroleum coke, a byproduct of oil extraction from tar sands, or plant biomass.
The end product--natural gas--is a lot cleaner to burn than coal and can be transported through existing pipelines. Other chemicals in the coal, including nitrogen and sulfur, can be separated and sold for industrial use, according to Perlman.
But GreatPoint Energy's process also creates carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. To keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the company plans to build its plants in places where it can be pumped underground to get more oil out of existing wells, a technique already done in the oil and gas industry.
Overall, GreatPoint's process can produce natural gas at between $4 and $5 per million British thermal units (MMBtu), which is in the range of today's prices but a lot lower than natural gas prices before the global recession hit.
Cleaner fossil fuels?
Many entrepreneurs interested in green technologies have gravitated toward solar power, which still garners the most venture capital compared to other segments, or IT-related fields like smart-grid tech.
But Perlman argues that renewable energy sources, which represent less than 3 percent of power generation in the U.S., cannot be ramped up fast enough to make a significant impact on cleaning up power generation.
"The problem with renewables is that realistically they may not get us to where we need to go. Coal has to realistically be in the mix and realistically be a big part of the mix," he said at last month's AlwaysOn GoingGreen East conference, where GreatPoint Energy was picked as the top green business.
The company is pursuing other coal plants in China and the U.S. Following its demonstration facility with Datang, it hopes to build a full-scale plant, which would cost $1 billion, Perlman said.
"China is tremendously short on natural gas. They are going to have to use more natural gas if they are going to clean the environment and address their air problems," he said.
GreatPoint Energy CEO Andrew Perlman at GoingGreen East conference in Boston.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)
Rather than stay in the ground, trash from the Three Rivers Landfill in Ponotoc, Miss., will be turned into ethanol.
Montreal-based Enerkem on Thursday announced plans to produce 20 million gallons a year of ethanol from waste at the Mississippi landfill in a project valued at $250 million.
This is some of the equipment used in Enerkem's multistage process for convering waste to fuel.
(Credit: Enerkem)The "feedstock" for the ethanol will be municipal solid waste, as well as wood residues from forest and agricultural activities, according to Enerkem.
The company's process can sort household trash, diverting material that can be recycled and processing the rest into ethanol, a liquid fuel blended with gasoline.
The project is one of only a few in North America to convert waste products into ethanol or electricity using processes that waste-to-energy companies say is cleaner than existing technologies such as incineration.
After sorting and drying the waste, Enerkem breaks down the material with heat and pressure using a gasifier. The gasifier creates a synthesis gas that is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That synthesis gas, or syngas, is then converted into ethanol or other chemicals.
The company, which was founded in 2000, has built a few demonstration facilities in Canada using both municipal solid trash and utility poles as a feedstock. At a conference earlier this month, company CEO Vincent Chornet said the technology is largely developed and that Enerkem is now looking to commercialize the process more broadly.
Coskata and BlueFire Ethanol are two other cellulosic-ethanol companies that plan to turn both wood chips and municipal solid waste into ethanol.
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.
When a school or office building thinks about distributed energy, it usually means solar panels propped up on a roof.
A small company called IST Energy has another vision: it's developed a shipping container-size contraption that turns your building's trash into electricity and heat. The company is expected to unveil the unit, called the Green Energy Machine (GEM), on Monday.
The idea behind the GEM is to offset a building's energy use while dramatically cutting trash disposal fees. The cost of trash removal can vary greatly, but a university or office park with a number of buildings could pay about $200,000 a year, according to IST Energy executives.
The company says the GEM is clean technology because it doesn't burn the trash. Instead, the machine uses gasification, a process that overall pollutes less than combustion. A number of clean-tech companies are trying to combine gasification with renewable sources of fuel, namely municipal solid waste or biomass.
A demonstration unit of the Green Energy Machine from IST Energy that converts trash into energy.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)The GEM unit is designed to take up as much space as three parking spaces, making it suitable for office buildings, hospitals, and the like. Metal and glass have no energy content, so they should be recycled. But everything else--food, cardboard, plastics, agricultural wastes--can go in.
"Normally, when we tell people what we're doing, they say, 'You can do that? I had no idea that was possible," said Stu Haber, president and chief executive of IST, which is based in Waltham, Mass.
The company, which was spun out of a research and development firm, says it can convert 95 percent of the waste--up to three tons of trash a day--into usable energy. The remaining 5 percent is ash. With three tons of trash a day, a unit can provide enough electricity and heat for a 200,000 square-foot building holding about 500 people, it says.
So far, a handful of universities, a municipality, and a real-estate developer have come by its Waltham, Mass. offices for demonstrations.
Got a big trash bill?
Haber said the unit pays for itself relatively quickly but realizes that the novelty of the GEM could make it a tough sell. He hopes to sell between 5 and 10 units this year. "The first GEM will be the hardest one to sell," he said. Noise from the machine could also be a barrier.
Corporate purchases of solar panels have been growing rapidly, depending on a state's incentives. Haber argued that many companies invest in solar energy to reduce their carbon footprint in a visible way, but a purchase of a GEM can be driven entirely by money, he argued.
Loading garbage into the demonstration unit of the Green Energy Machine.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)Feeding the maximum of three tons of trash will yield about 120 kilowatts of electricity and about double that in heat, which will fulfill about 15 percent of a building's energy needs, IST Energy figures. The bigger financial benefit is in cutting disposal fees, Haber said.
With an up-front cost of $850,000, a GEM unit will have a payback in three to four years, the company calculates. More likely, those interested will go with a leasing option that would eliminate the hefty up-front investment.
"Everybody loves the fact that they're helping the environment, but because we're talking to businesspeople, I have to assume that they're interested because of the very quick payback," he said.
There's also a 10 percent federal tax credit available for this sort of renewable energy, Haber said.
Squeezing more value from refuse
From the end user's point of view, the GEM is designed to be simple. Through a loader, trash goes into the machine, which shreds the garbage.
Then the machine removes moisture and creates pellets--shaped just like the sawdust pellets used in pellet stoves. Then the pellets are put into an air-fed gasifier designed by the company, which generates what is called a synthetic gas, or producer gas, which typically contains mostly hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
The dark pellets were made from office trash. On the right are sawdust pellets used in pellet stoves.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)That gas is the fuel for making electricity or heat. IST Energy recommends that the best energy source would be a natural-gas microturbine, which would need to have its setting adjusted, or a generator. It takes about two hours before the GEM runs from its own energy output, so the main carbon emissions come from burning the synthetic gas.
Garbage is already used as fuel source in a number of places. Some landfill operators capture methane from degrading trash to make electricity. Trash incinerators, too, can create some usable energy, but they are considered inefficient and polluting.
Looking to reduce shipments of diesel fuel, the U.S. Army last year tested portable trash-powered generators in Iraq, but the project is said to have not met all its goals.
For energy technology firms looking for a cheap source of fuel, trash appears to be attracting more interest.
Another Boston-area company called Ze-Gen is pursuing the same general idea as IST Energy. Last week, it raised a Series B round of $20 million to build a facility to take construction debris and make electricity at a central location using a gasification process.
Another firm, InEnTech in Oregon, is pursuing a different technology process to get the most energy out of household garbage.
Many of these firms have yet to test their products at commercial scale. But at a time when people are seeking clean and renewable-energy sources, waste may come full circle and become a valuable commodity again.
Updated at 3:00 p.m. PT to correct reference to synthetic gas.
Waste-to-energy firm Ze-Gen said Tuesday that it has raised money to further develop and commercialize its technology for converting municipal solid waste to electricity.
The company announced a series B round of $20 million that was led by a division of the Oman-based conglomerate Omar Zawawi Establishment.
Workers at Ze-Gen's waste-to-electricty test facility in Bedford, Mass.
(Credit: Ze-Gen)There are a handful of firms developing different processes for converting municipal solid waste into usable energy. There are landfills that capture methane gas, which can be burned for electricity. Energy from incinerated trash can be used, too, but it is considered inefficient and polluting.
Ze-Gen uses presorted construction debris, which is put through a gasification process, where the trash is heated and put under pressure. Unlike burning, gasification yields what's called synthetic gas, which can be burned to make electricity.
The company has a demonstration facility in Bedford, Mass., where it intends to supply electricity to the local utility.
Last year, the original developers of the core technology filed suit against Ze-Gen, alleging that the intellectual property was misappropriated. Company executives have said the case has no merit.
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