Plasma Gasification: Turn Garbage into Yuan Chi?

Note: this article is interesting because it is basically an external alchemy fire technology that rapidly returns garbage into sometime approximating it original state, with a few byproducts. Inner alchemy does the same thing with psychic garbage. Water & fire alchemy does it slowly and safely.
Anyway, hopeuflly the landfill will become a thing of the past. I expect other alchemical type of technologies to be emerging that will revolutionize the way we live – if we can cause an internal revolution to keep up with the outer one….
-michael

THE PROPHET OF GARBAGE
By Michael Behar
Popular Science
March 2007

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/873aae7bf86c0110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcr
d.html

It sounds as if someone just dropped a tricycle into a meat grinder. I¹m
sitting inside a narrow conference room at a research facility in Bristol,
Connecticut, chatting with Joseph Longo, the founder and CEO of Startech
Environmental Corporation. As we munch on takeout Subway sandwiches, a
plate-glass window is the only thing separating us from the adjacent lab,
which contains a glowing caldera of ³plasma² three times as hot as the
surface of the sun. Every few minutes there¹s a horrific clanking
noise‹grinding followed by a thunderous voomp, like the sound a gas barbecue
makes when it first ignites.

³Is it supposed to do that?² I ask Longo nervously. ³Yup,² he says. ³That¹s
normal.²

Despite his 74 years, Longo bears an unnerving resemblance to the longtime
cover boy of Mad magazine, Alfred E. Neuman, who shrugs off nuclear
Armageddon with the glib catchphrase ³What, me worry?² Both share red hair,
a smattering of freckles and a toothy grin. When such a man tells me I¹m
perfectly safe from a 30,000šF arc of man-made lightning heating a vat of
plasma that his employees are ³controlling² in the next room — well, I¹m
not completely reassured.

To put me at ease, Longo calls in David Lynch, who manages the demonstration
facility. ³There¹s no flame or fire inside. It¹s just electricity,² Lynch
assures me of the multimillion-dollar system that took Longo almost two
decades to design and build. Then the two usher me into the lab, where the
gleaming 15-foot-tall machine they¹ve named the Plasma Converter stands in
the center of the room. The entire thing takes up about as much space as a
two-car garage, surprisingly compact for a machine that can consume nearly
any type of waste — from dirty diapers to chemical weapons — by
annihilating toxic materials in a process as old as the universe itself.
Called plasma gasification, it works a little like the big bang, only
backward (you get nothing from something). Inside a sealed vessel made of
stainless steel and filled with a stable gas — either pure nitrogen or, as
in this case, ordinary air — a 650-volt current passing between two
electrodes rips electrons from the air, converting the gas into plasma.
Current flows continuously through this newly formed plasma, creating a
field of extremely intense energy very much like lightning. The radiant
energy of the plasma arc is so powerful, it disintegrates trash into its
constituent elements by tearing apart molecular bonds. The system is capable
of breaking down pretty much anything except nuclear waste, the isotopes of
which are indestructible. The only by-products are an obsidian-like glass
used as a raw material for numerous applications, including bathroom tiles
and high-strength asphalt, and a synthesis gas, or ³syngas² — a mixture of
primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be converted into a variety
of marketable fuels, including ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen.

Perhaps the most amazing part of the process is that it¹s self-sustaining.
Just like your toaster, Startech¹s Plasma Converter draws its power from the
electrical grid to get started. The initial voltage is about equal to the
zap from a police stun gun. But once the cycle is under way, the 2,200šF
syngas is fed into a cooling system, generating steam that drives turbines
to produce electricity. About two thirds of the power is siphoned off to run
the converter; the rest can be used on-site for heating or electricity, or
sold back to the utility grid. ³Even a blackout would not stop the operation
of the facility,² Longo says.

It all sounds far too good to be true. But the technology works. Over the
past decade, half a dozen companies have been developing plasma technology
to turn garbage into energy. ³The best renewable energy is the one we
complain about the most: municipal solid waste,² says Louis Circeo, the
director of plasma research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. ³It will
prove cheaper to take garbage to a plasma plant than it is to dump it on a
landfill.² A Startech machine that costs roughly $250 million could handle
2,000 tons of waste daily, approximately what a city of a million people
amasses in that time span. Large municipalities typically haul their trash
to landfills, where the operator charges a ³tipping fee² to dump the waste.
The national average is $35 a ton, although the cost can be more than twice
that in the Northeast (where land is scarce, tipping fees are higher). And
the tipping fee a city pays doesn¹t include the price of trucking the
garbage often hundreds of miles to a landfill or the cost of capturing leaky
methane — a greenhouse gas — from the decomposing waste. In a city with an
average tipping fee, a $250-million converter could pay for itself in about
10 years, and that¹s without factoring in the money made from selling the
excess electricity and syngas. After that break-even point, it¹s pure
profit.

Someday very soon, cities might actually make money from garbage.

Talking Trash

It was a rainy morning when I pulled up to Startech R&D to see Longo waiting
for me in the parking lot. Wearing a bright yellow oxford shirt, a striped
tie and blue pinstriped pants, he dashed across the blacktop to greet me as
I stepped from my rental car. A street-smart Brooklyn native, Longo was an
only child raised by parents who worked long hours at a local factory that
made baseballs and footballs. He volunteered to fight in Korea as a
paratrooper after a friend was killed in action. He¹s fond of antiquated
slang like ³attaboy² and ³shills² (as in ³those shills stole my patents²)
and is old-school enough to have only recently abandoned the protractors,
pencils and drafting tables that he used to design his original Plasma
Converter in favor of computers.

Today, Longo is meeting with investors from U.S. Energy, a trio of veteran
waste-disposal executives who recently formed a partnership to build the
first plasma-gasification plant on Long Island, New York. They own a
transfer station (where garbage goes for sorting en route to landfills) and
are in the process of buying six Startech converters to handle 3,000 tons of
construction debris a day trucked from sites around the state. ³It¹s mostly
old tile, wood, nails, glass, metal and wire all mixed together,² one of the
project¹s partners, Troy Caruso, tells me. For the demonstration, Longo
prepares a sampling of typical garbage — bottles of leftover prescription
drugs, bits of fiberglass insulation, a half-empty can of Slim-Fast. A
conveyer belt feeds the trash into an auger, which shreds and crushes it
into pea-size morsels (that explains the deafening grinding sound) before
stuffing it into the plasma-reactor chamber. The room is warm and humid, and
a dull hum emanates from the machinery.

Caruso and his partners, Paul Marazzo and Michael Nuzzi, are silent at
first. They¹ve seen the demo before. But as more trash vanishes into the
converter, they become increasingly animated, spouting off facts and figures
about how the machine will revolutionize their business. ³This technology
eliminates the landfill, which is 80 percent of our costs,² Nuzzi says. ³And
we can use it to generate fuel at the back end,² adds Marazzo, who then asks
Lynch if the converter can handle chunks of concrete (answer: yes). ³The
bottom line is that nobody wants a landfill in their backyard,² Nuzzi tells
me. New York City is already paying an astronomical $90 a ton to get rid of
its trash. According to Startech, a few 2,000-ton-per-day
plasma-gasification plants could do it for $36. Sell the syngas and surplus
electricity, and you¹d actually net $15 a ton. ³Gasification is not just
environmentally friendly,² Nuzzi says. ³It¹s a good business decision.²

The converter we¹re watching vaporize Slim-Fast is a mini version of
Startech¹s technology, capable of consuming five tons a day of solid waste,
or about what 2,200 Americans toss in the trash every 24 hours. Fueled with
garbage from the local dump, the converter is fired up whenever Longo
pitches visiting clients.

Longo has been talking with the National Science Foundation about installing
a system at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The Vietnamese government is
considering buying one to get rid of stockpiles of Agent Orange that the
U.S. military left behind after the war. Investors from China, Poland,
Japan, Romania, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Venezuela, the U.K., Mexico and
Canada have all entered contract negotiations with Startech after making the
pilgrimage to Bristol to see Longo¹s dog-and-pony show.

Startech isn¹t the only company using plasma to turn waste into a source of
clean energy. A handful of start-ups — Geoplasma, Recovered Energy,
PyroGenesis, EnviroArc and Plasco Energy, among others — have entered the
market in the past decade. But Longo, who has worked in the garbage business
for four decades, is perhaps the industry¹s most passionate founding father.
³What¹s so devilishly wonderful about plasma gasification is that it¹s
completely circular,² he says. ³It takes everything back to its fundamental
components in a way that¹s beautiful.² Although all plasma gasification
systems recapture syngas to turn into fuel, Startech¹s ³Starcell² system
seems to be ahead of the pack in its ability to economically convert the
substance into eco-friendly and competitively priced fuels. ³A lot of other
gasification technologies require multiple steps. This is a one-step
process,² says Patrick Davis of the U.S. Department of Energy¹s office of
hydrogen production and delivery, which has awarded Longo¹s company almost
$1 million in research grants. ³You put the waste in the reactor and you get
out the syngas. That¹s it.²

The Garbage Man

After his tour of duty in Korea, Longo put himself through night school at
the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. In 1959, engineering degree in hand, he
got a job at American Machine & Foundry (AMF) — the same company that today
runs the world¹s largest chain of bowling alleys — designing hardened silos
for nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as Titan and
Minuteman. ³There was never a time I can remember when I didn¹t want to be
an engineer,² he says.

For years, Longo tried to convince his bosses at AMF to go into the garbage
business (as manager of new product development, he was charged with
investigating growth areas). ³I knew a lot about the industry, how backward
it was,² he says. The costs to collect and transport waste were climbing. He
was sure there had to be a better way.

In 1967 Longo quit his job at AMF to start his own business, called
International Dynetics. The name might not be familiar, but its product
should: Longo designed and built the world¹s first industrial-size trash
compactors. ³If you live in a high-rise or apartment building and dump your
trash down a chute,² he says, ³it¹s probably going into one of our
compactors.²

When Longo started his company, it was still easier and cheaper to just haul
the loose trash to the dump. But gas prices climbed, inflation increased,
and soon, business boomed. In a few years, there were thousands of
International Dynetics compactors operating around the world. The machines
could crush the equivalent of five 30-gallon cans crammed with trash into a
cube that was about the size of a small television. ³Our purpose was to
condense it so it would be easier and cost less to bring to a landfill,² he
says.

Then, in 1972, Longo read a paper in a science journal about fusion
reactors. ³The authors speculated that plasma might be used to destroy waste
to the elemental level someday in the future,² he recalls. ³That was like a
spear in the heart, because we had just got our patents out for our trash
compactors, and these guys were already saying there¹s a prettier girl
coming to town,² he says. ³It would make obsolete everything we were doing.
I resisted looking at the technology for 10 years. But by 1984, it became
obvious that plasma could do some serious work.²

By then, the principal component of today¹s plasma gasification systems, the
plasma torch, had become widespread in the metal-fabrication industry, where
it is used as a cutting knife for slicing through slabs of steel. Most
engineers at the time were focused on ways to improve plasma torches for
manipulating metals. But Longo had trash on the brain — whole landfills of
trash. He was intent on developing a system that used plasma to convert
waste into energy on a large scale. So he jumped ship again. In 1988 Longo
sold International Dynetics and founded Startech.

Plasma to the People

³People kept asking me, ŒIf this is so good, Longo, then why isn¹t everyone
already using one?¹ ² he says, referring to himself in the third person, a
device he relies on frequently to emphasize his point. ³We had the technical
capability, but we didn¹t have a product yet. Just because we could do the
trick didn¹t mean it was worth doing.² Trucking garbage to dumps and
landfills was still cheap. Environmental concerns weren¹t on the public
radar the way they are today, and landfills and incinerators weren¹t yet
widely seen as public menaces. ³We outsourced the parts to build our first
converter,² Longo says. ³When we told the manufacturers we were working with
plasma, some of them thought it had something to do with blood and AIDS.²

Longo describes the development curve as ³relentless.² He teamed up with
another engineer who had experience in the waste industry and an interest in
plasma technology. ³We didn¹t have computers. We did everything on drafting
boards. But I was aggressive. And the more we did, the more it compelled us
to continue.² It took almost a decade of R&D until they had a working
prototype.

³I felt like St. Peter bringing the message out,² Longo says of his first
sales calls. In 1997 the U.S. Army became Startech¹s inaugural customer,
buying a converter to dispose of chemical weapons at the Aberdeen Proving
Ground in Maryland. A second reactor went to Japan for processing
polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, an industrial coolant and lubricant
banned in the U.S since 1977 (³really nasty stuff,² Longo says).

Longo realized early on that what would make plasma gasification marketable
was a machine that could handle anything. Some of the most noxious
chemicals, he knew from his decades in the garbage industry, are found in
the most mundane places, like household solid waste. Startech has an edge
over some of its competitors because its converter doesn¹t have to be
reconfigured for different materials, which means operators don¹t have to
presort waste, a costly and time-consuming process. To achieve this
adaptability, Startech converters crank the plasma arc up to an extremely
high operating temperature: 30,000šF. Getting that temperature just right
was one of Longo¹s key developmental challenges. ³You can¹t rely on the
customer to tell you what they put in,² Longo says. ³Sometimes they don¹t
know, sometimes they lie, and sometimes they¹ve thrown in live shotgun
shells from a hunting trip. That¹s why it¹s imperative that the Plasma
Converter can take in anything.²

A video camera mounted near the top of the converter at the Bristol plant
gives me a glimpse of the plasma arc doing its dirty work. At a computer
station near the converter, Lynch taps a few commands into a keyboard, and a
loud hiss fills the room, the sound of steam being released from behind a
pressurized valve. ³You can use that steam to heat your facility and
neighboring buildings,² he says proudly. Next to him is an LCD monitor with
a live video feed from inside the reactor. A vivid magenta glow fills the
screen as I watch the plasma torch vaporize a bucket of cellphones and soda
cans. A hopper at the top of the vessel dumps another load into the plasma
reactor, and seconds later, it vanishes too. ³The idea,² Lynch says, ³is
that regardless of what you put in the front end, what comes out will be
clean and ready to use for whatever you want.² I¹ve watched him operate the
converter for nearly an hour, and I¹m still stunned to see no smoke, no
flames, no ash, no pollution of any kind — all that¹s left is syngas, the
fuel source, and the molten obsidian-like material.

Catching the Litter Bug

Low transportation costs, cheap land, weak environmental regulations —
these factors help explain why it took plasma until now to catch on as an
economically sensible strategy to dispose of waste. ³The steep increase in
energy prices over the past two years is what has made this technology
viable,² says Hilburn Hillestad, president of Geoplasma. His company, which
touts the slogan ³waste destruction at the speed of lightning with energy to
share,² is negotiating a deal with St. Lucie County, Florida, to erect a
$425-million plasma gasification system near a local landfill. The plant in
St. Lucie County will be large enough to devour all 2,000 tons of daily
trash generated by the county and polish off an additional 1,000 tons a day
from the old landfill. Of course, the technology, still unproven on a large
scale, has its skeptics. ³That obsidian-like slag contains toxic heavy
metals and breaks down when exposed to water,² claims Brad Van Guilder, a
scientist at the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which advocates for
clean air and water. ³Dump it in a landfill, and it could one day
contaminate local groundwater.² Others wonder about the cleanliness of the
syngas. ³In the cool-down phases, the components in the syngas could re-form
into toxins,² warns Monica Wilson, the international coordinator for the
Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, in Berkeley, California. None
of this seems to worry St. Lucie County¹s solid-waste director, Leo
Cordeiro. ³We¹ll get all our garbage to disappear, and our landfill will be
gone in 20 years,² he tells me. The best part: Geoplasma is footing the
entire bill. ³We¹ll generate 160 megawatts a day from the garbage,²
Hillestad says, ³but we¹ll consume only 40 megawatts to run the plant. We¹ll
sell the net energy to the local power grid.² Sales from excess electricity
might allow Geoplasma to break even in 20 years.

In New York, Carmen Cognetta, an attorney with the city council¹s
infrastructure division, is evaluating how plasma gasification could help
offset some of the city¹s exorbitant waste costs. ³All the landfalls around
New York have closed, incinerators are banned, and we are trucking our trash
to Virginia and Pennsylvania,² he explains. ³That is costing the city $400
million a year. We could put seven or eight of these converters in the city,
and that would be enough.² The syngas from the converters, Cognetta says,
could be tapped for hydrogen gas to power buses or police cars. But the
decision-making bureaucracy can be slow, and it is hamstrung by the
politically well-connected waste-disposal industry. ³Many landfill operators
are used to getting a million dollars a month out of debris,² says U.S.
Energy¹s Paul Marazzo. ³They don¹t want a converter to happen because
they¹ll lose their revenue.²

Meanwhile, Victor Sziky, the president of Sicmar International, an
investment firm based in Panama, is working with the Panamanian government
to set up at least 10 Startech systems there. ³The garbage problem here is
exploding in conjunction with growth,² says Sziky, who lives in Panama City.
³We have obsolete incinerators, and landfills that are polluting groundwater
and drinking water. We¹ve had outbreaks of cholera and hepatitis A and B
directly attributed to the waste in landfills. There are a lot of people in
a small country, and there¹s no infrastructure to deal with it.² The project
will be capable of destroying 200 tons of trash a day at each location,
enough to handle all the garbage for the municipalities involved — and,
says Sziky, to produce up to 40 percent of their electrical demand.

Panama¹s syngas will probably be converted to hydrogen and sold to
industrial suppliers. The current market for hydrogen is at least $50
billion worldwide, a figure that is expected to grow by 5 to 10 percent
annually, according to the National Hydrogen Association, an industry and
research consortium. Analysts at Fuji-Keizai USA, a market-research firm for
emerging technologies, predict that the domestic market will hit $1.6
billion by 2010, up from $800 million in 2005. The Department of Energy¹s
Patrick Davis says that when the long-awaited hydrogen-powered vehicles
finally arrive, the demand for hydrogen will soar. But he also notes that to
have an effect on global warming, it¹s critical that hydrogen come from
clean sources.

That¹s one more idea that¹s old news to Longo, who, as usual, is 10 steps
ahead of the game, already embedded in a future where fossil fuels are
artifacts of a bygone era. For the past several years, he has been
developing the Starcell, a filtration mechanism that slaps onto the back end
of his converter and quickly refines syngas into hydrogen. As he says, ³We
are the disruptive technology.² Longo has been working in garbage for 40
years, making his fortune by literally scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Which is, it turns out, the perfect vantage point for finding new ways to
turn what to most of us is just garbage into arguably the most valuable
thing in the world: clean energy.

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