Slashdot Mirror
Trash-To-Gas Power Plant Gets Greenlight
An anonymous reader writes "Beginning in a little more than a week, Green Power, Inc. of Pasco, Washington will be commencing the building of municipal-solid-waste-to-fuel plants for clients around the world, with $2 billion in contracts; now that an EPA ruling has exonerated GPI from an unnecessary shut-down order by the Washington Ecology Department last year. This fuel would be of higher quality and cheaper than fuel derived from crude oil — and it comes from local feedstock, while turning waste into energy. Now your laptop can turn into a quart of diesel fuel to power your trip to the dump. And the ocean gyres of trash the size of Texas can power Texas. This is an update on a Slashdot story from nine months ago.
First (com)post!
During early winter our yard has an almost 6-inch layer of leaves. If a service would scoop them up and take them away for free, they could use them for fuel. It would benefit 3 parties: us (leaf removal), the leaf processing company, and The Planet.
Table-ized A.I.
Sim city 3000 had them in sim city 4 I like to put them all in one city with lot's high pollution industry in there own city and just set up deals with the clean city.
Stupid Question: Could the trash from the ocean gyres be used to power the operations to remove trash from the ocean gyres?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Waste to Power Generators produce heavy polution. Even if they do create 5000mwh it is hardly ever worth building. Better to use a few city ordinances to keep waste managed. And then build a nuclear power plant, fucking 16,000mwh for only 40grand hell yes.
Who are these guys, really?
I grew up in central Washington and let me tell you, there is a lot of literal bullshit and cowshit there. I-82 from Yakima to the Tri-cities (Pasco is one) is a long line of stock yards and farms.
The odd thing is that the Tri-cities is the bedroom community for the only active nuke power plant in the state, Hanford.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Those gyres are not what you think they are.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...and nature can recycle that stuff far more efficiently than we can.
To show support, jesus-mother-fucking-christ-cunt-licking-homo-basterds!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
The story makes me curious as to why they were earlier ordered to shutdown. Anyone have the story behind that?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
What I always wonder about with these waste-to-energy-it's-like-incineration-but-not-that-bad-kind-you-remember schemes is what happens with waste that is nasty on the level of the elements it contains, rather than just chemically.
If you burn something hard enough(not always something you can expect a real-world plant to do, with out considerable care; but we'll be charitable) virtually anything that is nasty because of its chemical structure is no longer your problem. That's why they incinerate chemical weapons, after all. With things like lead, cadmium, mercury, chlorine, etc. though, that are just tactless at the atomic level, about all you can do is produce aerosols, oxides, or both. Those then rain down merrily on the surrounding environment and proceed to do their thing.
Unfortunately, especially with modern plastics-and-electronics waste, which is very hard to separate economically from the rest of the stuff, such elements are all over the place. Your average widget from two christmasses ago probably contains a decent amount of chlorine, in the form of PVC insulation and the like, possibly some NiCads, bromated flame retardants, maybe some pre-ROHS leaded board or components, and possibly some plastic dyes that you don't really want to be burning(for instance, most of the world's cadmium that doesn't go into batteries goes either into optoelectronics or lightfast dyes for plastics. Lovely yellows and reds can be achieved)...
If there were some giant stream of nice, clean FDA-approved-for-food-contact polystyrene or something, burning it would produce pretty much nothing but the co2 and water, possibly a bit of carbon black, that you'd expect from looking at a basic chem textbook. With real world waste streams, though, there is so much ancillary crap in there that bad results are positively to be expected. It might still be better than coal, or better than incomplete combustion in a 19th century tech incinerator or Bubba's burn pit; but it isn't going to be pretty.
They liquify it, then they drink it and get wasted.
From TFA:
So the government of my state caused major problems for GPI, and the federal government had to overrule the state. That's just great.
According to TFA, GPI's plant operates using "a proprietary catalytic pressure-less depolymerization process (CDP)" yet the state Department of Ecology (DoE) insisted on regulating the plant as if it were an incinerator plant, which it clearly isn't.
We have a liberal Democrat for a governor, the Democrats have a complete lock on the state legislature, and plenty of liberal voters. Our governor claims to be in favor of the environment, in favor of business that helps the state, in favor of jobs, etc. Where was she when the state DoE was causing these problems?
I really wonder at the politics behind this. If this is random bureaucrats just being pointlessly bureaucratic, why didn't any other part of government get involved and help resolve this? Where were the state senators and representatives from the Pasco area? Did the governor just never hear of this, and if so, how is that possible?
If I were governor and something like this happened, I would very publicly intervene. There's no political downside! The governor has more power than bureaucrats at the DoE, and the voters would love to hear that a green energy project was helped out. So why didn't that happen?
P.S. This of course reminds me of the other thermal depolymerization plant, the plant in Carthage, Missouri that processed turkey offal into energy and fuel. That plant was shut down several times, over allegations of a bad smell; the bad smell was reported at least once on a day that the plant wasn't operating. Eventually they installed upgraded scrubbers on their exhaust stacks and resumed operation. The company, Changing World Technologies went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and I guess the TDP plant was shut down. That seems crazy to me; the price of crude oil is high, so they should be able to run their plant at a profit. I guess they are just in too much trouble financially to even run the plant right now?
I hope this "CDP" plant in Pasco works out better than the Changing Worlds one did.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
But think of New Jersey! That state alone could power the country!
Feedstock in this context refers mainly to natural organics, such as leaves and twigs, corn stalks and husks, etc. As such, this plant is probably not so different from the "thermal reactors" that are currently making fuel oil from processed chicken parts and other such dross
This operation is a good thing, don't misunderstand me. But for the foreseeable future, we will not be turning laptops into fuel oil.
This article from 2006: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1677696/posts "Arrangements are presently underway to receive technical verification and standardization, through Combustion Resources of Provo, Utah, as well as Idaho National Laboratories, two independent and nationally recognized research firms, which specialize in study and verification of similar technologies. Their initial analysis should be complete within a few weeks. What does it mean to say 'arrangements are presently underway'? It isn't clear if either of these firms actually did anything and no results were ever mentioned after that point.
Yo dawg! I heard you like waste......
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
"Green Power describes its process as a proprietary catalytic pressure-less depolymerization process (CDP) where municipal solid waste or a wide variety of organic wastes are 'cracked' at the molecular level and the long-chain polymers (plastic, organic material such as wood, etc.) are chemically altered to become short-chain hydrocarbons with no combustion. Combustion requires oxygen or a similar compound, but according to Green Power the CDP occurs in an anaerobic environment, exposed only to inert gases like nitrogen."
This sounds very similar to a heavy oil conversion unit, which takes long chains of hydrocarbons (organic materials) and breaks them into smaller molecules. Refineries have been doing this for decades! I'm not saying this isn't good to reduce overall waste or anything like that, but unless I'm missing something, this is hardly new technology...
As a couple examples of conversion units:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coker_unit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking
I would think the EPA could only stop them from running their own plant in the US, but not from producing the parts to install overseas. Can anyone find one specific location mentioned where one of these will be going? Or one foreign official that will admit to buying one of these?
That is false, English has, in addition to compound nouns, compound verbs and compound adjectives.
"The summary must be joking about the ocean gyres."
There are questions about the guy running this company, up here in Washington state.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_pasco_biomass.html
http://pesn.com/2009/08/07/9501560_CEO_appealing_GreenPowerInc_shut-down_order/
Some have voiced serious concerns that this is all snake-oil, primarily because the man hides behind "trade secrets" protection and doesn't really have to discuss how all this works(precisely the reason state regulators shut him down--they cannot really know if he is in compliance if they don't know what he is doing, and so far he hasn't told them). He has also failed to pay some of his employees yet claims he will be hiring up to 500 more employees even though the technical data suggests he only needs 5 people per shift, had the company's demonstration truck burn down, and according to the Seattle PI article, been evicted from his plant location.
The one curious thing is that the military tested his technology and actually published some hard numbers that to me seem rather impressive. Makes me wonder what sort of "garbage" went through his test plant.
http://pesn.com/2010/02/19/959019_GPI_3rd-party_test_results_trash-to-fuel/
This is the best time-line I was able to find in regards to this company (not surprisingly, from the same website as the submitted article).
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Green_Power_Inc's_NanoDiesel:Catalytic_Pressureless_Depolymerization_(Oiling)
At least the writer of the submitted article is up front--"Note: I have a relationship with GPI, so this report is not truly independent." says the caption accompanying the photo in the article.
Can you say "media blitz"?
Sorry, the "military" involvement seems anything but--the link to the "military" results are just a PDF obviously assembled by the same company.
I see nothing from the military at all. I have no idea why he is claiming such a thing.
*sigh*
And buried in a previous /. article about the man...
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2474527/
I really should have finished researching him before posting. Sorry.
I'll shut up now.
I heard you can power a pickup truck with Horse Poop....
At least that is what the History Channel says in Apocalypse PA.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The EPA estimates that 30% to 50% of solid waste in at least some areas of the US is generated from construction and demolition of buildings. Of that, about 55% is from demolition with the remainder being from construction and remodeling. Of what construction and demolition waste hits landfills, 30% to 40% is lumber.
Most C&D waste, including lumber, brick, concrete blocks, poured concrete, pipes, plumbing fixtures, wiring, flooring, drywall, glass, and asphalt can be either reconditioned or recycled.
So yeah, it's good to get your old laptop turned into something useful like fuel. Don't forget to get your building waste turned into something useful, too, though. Most of it can be processed and resold rather than going into the landfill in the first place.
More Fischer-Tropsch Evil, Go Vivoleum instead
I'm from the Isle of Man; we already have one of these.
He seems to be claiming a process relatively similar to the thermal depolymerization process that Changing World Technologies (a little bit TOO optimistic of a name if you ask me...) tried.
CWT's technology deadended. Part of it was due to NIMBYism at the pilot plant, part was due to betting on changes to USDA regulations that would ban feeding animal parts to other animals which never actually went through, but there has to be some other reason for it... Otherwise it would've taken off rapidly in Europe, where feeding animal parts to other animals IS banned and you actually have to pay a hefty disposal fee for animal waste due to concerns about prion-based diseases.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I think the GP is suggesting that ships (maybe solar-powered autonomous ones) could filter the plastic from the gyre, and the collected material could help offset the cost of the operation. Of course there's no financial incentive to do it right now, and there probably never will be, but if governments decide to put some money towards doing this it could be a good idea. Robot boats collect plastic, a bigger ship (again, maybe a solar-powered autonomous one) sails out every once in a while and empties the robo-scavengers, and the plastic is then sold for conversion to fuel.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
>ruling has exonerated GPI from an unnecessary shut-down order by the Washington Ecology Department last year.
Seriously, the oil companies are at it again, get this revoked so they can still sell their oil, where as this technology will be able to help prevent needs on overseas supplies. I am glad it is up and running again.