A Waste Gasification Plant In a Truck

waderoush writes "There are plenty of waste-to-energy plants around the US, but most of them simply burn the waste, dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Gasification technology, by contrast, converts nearly all of the waste into gases like hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be used to run generators and furnaces. The problem is that most gasification facilities are factory-sized. Now a startup outside Boston has built a combination shredder-dryer-pelletizer-gasifier that fits into 30-by-8-by-8-foot shipping container. The so-called 'Green Energy Machine' can be backed up to a loading dock by truck, processing 3 tons of solid waste per day and putting out enough synthetic gas to run a 120-kilowatt generator or a 240-kilowatt-equivalent furnace. The makers say the machine can eliminate 540 tons of carbon emissions per year, in large part by reducing the amount of waste that goes to methane-generating landfills."

Comments

Thinking Creativly About Energy

[WiiVault]

When I lived in Iowa briefly I was amazed at some of the cool ideas people have come up with to use waste to create energy. As I'm sure many of you know, Iowa is big farm country, lots of cattle. So somebody devised a way to burn cow feces and use it to create power. Some small towns are using this as a means to cut back on buying energy, while at the same time finding a use for stuff that would otherwise just help contaminate the drinking water. Our energy problems are big, but the key to getting stuff done is creativity.

Re:Thinking Creativly About Energy

[umghhh]

I suppose there is no one single way of dealing with shortage of fossil fuels so we will need many methods if one of them deals with big part of our garbage that is only good.
Plants that process manure are maybe not a common thing but their use is getting more and more popular. The advantage is there also that the processed thing can be used as fertilizer and it does not stink as terrible as the original thing. Why the method is not more popular I do not know. Seems to be no brainer.

The solution is a distributed architecture

[Max Romantschuk]

This is a nice idea. In fact I think all solutions which work by localizing energy distribution is the way to go. Minimizing needless transportation of energy and waste is a huge improvement over the current situation.

I don't think there will ever be a single "silver bullet" tech to solve our energy and environment issues. The solution is lots and lots of small local (even house-level) improvements.

Carbon Monoxide?

[cbhacking]

CO to me usually means toxic and dangerous, not fuel source. I'm willing to believe it could be used to produce power, but I'd want to be quite sure it was well contained. It doesn't take much concentration of that stuff to kill a person, and the toxicity means you often lose consciousness before you know you're suffocating (and end up on the floor, where the air quality will be worst).