Plasma trash "Zapper" - Florida - St. Lucie County 2

[MJCronin]

To all,

It is my understanding that, since 2006, St. Lucie County in Florida is planning to build the "worlds largest" plasma based garbage/trash waste vaporization and power generation facility.

A company called "GEOPLASMA" is promising a $425+ million dollar - 160MWE(gross)facility; with 120 MWe available for sale to the grid.

3000 tons per day of trash will be consumed (!!???)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,213363,00.html

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-09-fla-county-trash_x.htm.

The main GEOPLASMA proponent of this plant is an Atlanta based developer and president of GEOPLASMA, Hilburn Hillestad; a former ecology/biology instructor.

http://biowaste.blogspot.com/2007/01/geoplasma-answers-trash-vaporization.html

http://bioconversion.blogspot.com/2006/09/florida-county-to-vaporize-trash.html

County officials are smiling, non-technical people are pontificating, snarling lawyers and greedy developers are shaking hands and counting the money that they hope to soon make.....

Oh.....ummmm.....they don't seem to have an experienced engineering firm on board yet.....(!!??)

And....um...they seem to be claiming to be able to use the "low grade" heat generated by the plasma arcs as contributing to the generated megawattage of the plant.

(This is equivalent to claiming the heat expelled by cooling towers in a conventional power plant as available for generation !!!)

This new plasma zapper will be the largest in the world (by an order of magnitude !!). Smaller, demo plants have been built in Japan and Italy with limited sucess.

Anybody smell a rat ?

I do not believe that the plant will work, as advertised thermally and I believe that St. Lucie County and its moronic lawyers, consultants and MBAs are being blinded by "Greenness"

Does anyone else have doubts about this project..??

My opinion only..

-MJC

 

[KENAT]

Or, maybe they're primarily a victim of the 'credit crunch', can't get the financing they need?

However, I suspect your thinking is at least partially correct.

KENAT,

Have you reminded yourself of faq731-376 recently, or taken a look at

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[MJCronin]

An update....

The troubles with the massive St.Lucie trash-zapper plant and the overblown claims by the developer are finally being realized....two years later.

An excerpt from that fine paper, The Sacramento Bee:

"Sacramento trash-to-energy plan raises red flags"

By Terri Hardy and Chris Bowman

Presented with a controversial and highly technical proposal to vaporize garbage into energy, Sacramento City Council members earlier this month wondered what other cities had found – and whether those lessons were being considered in Sacramento.

The plan's chief proponent, Councilwoman Lauren Hammond, said Friday that while she remains committed to working on a viable waste-to-energy plan for Sacramento, she believes the vetting process by the city's upper management was "done wrong."

"If we have to start all over, we start all over," Hammond said.

On Dec. 9, the council is scheduled to vote on whether to bind itself for decades to a company that vows to zap Sacramento's trash at the same price it would cost to bury it in a landfill.

Under the proposed deal, Sacramento-based U.S. Science & Technology and a consortium of energy and engineering companies would build a "plasma arc gasification" waste-to-energy plant at no cost to the city, then sell the energy for profit.

But a Bee review of two other municipalities that have considered the same technology – and evaluated proposals from companies involved in the Sacramento deal – raises several red flags:

• The effort is faltering financially in St. Lucie County, Fla. The developer there, GeoPlasma of Atlanta, has scaled back the proposed project by at least 80 percent.

• Los Angeles County rejected GeoPlasma's pitch at the outset, saying financial details and performance data were lacking.

• Environmental experts in both locales have questioned whether toxic metals would be filtered from the waste gas produced for sale to various energy buyers.


Process touted as clean, safe

The technology is alluring, scoring high in "gee-whiz" value and as an alternative to filling landfills. Gas heated to temperatures approaching those on the sun's surface vaporizes trash, producing a synthetic fuel. Also, the residual molten glass and metals can be sold as filler for road and building construction.

U.S. Science & Technology has told Sacramento the technology has been used for decades in steel plants. The group portrays the process as safe and cleaner than many other alternatives.

"We don't just want to build a facility in Sacramento to address the problem on municipal waste," the company's president, William Ludwig, said recently. "We want to give Sacramento the opportunity to be in a leadership position solving environmental problems."

The deal before the City Council would have Sacramento relying on the company to process waste at a steady flow of 2,100 tons per week.

GeoPlasma, the energy company that would build and operate the St. Lucie County plant in Florida, told officials there that the process would empty the landfill in 20 years.


Troubles with Florida contract

That promise fell through before construction even began. Initially, the plant was to process 1,000 tons of garbage daily, gradually ramping up to 3,000 tons a day. In September, two years later, GeoPlasma announced that it would vaporize only 200 tons a day, said Chris Craft, a St. Lucie County commissioner.

The St. Lucie team also includes Alter NRG and its subsidiary, Westinghouse Plasma Corp., which would design the plant. (Alter NRG and Westinghouse are part of the Sacramento deal, and GeoPlasma once was listed as a partner here, too.)

Craft said revenue troubles, not technological ones, were rocking the deal there. For instance, he said, a plan for GeoPlasma to sell steam from the facility to a nearby Tropicana juice plant didn't materialize.

Now GeoPlasma is scrambling to find more customers for the energy and recyclable leftovers, Craft said, to keep its promise not to charge the county more than it pays for sending its trash to a landfill.


Lack of details sends up 'red flag'

In Sacramento, financial details have not been shared with the city. U.S. Science & Technology said it would not divulge that information until the council had approved a binding agreement – a demand City Councilman Steve Cohn, an attorney, recently called a "red flag."

http://www.sacbee.com/378/story/1403368.html

-MJC

 

[MJCronin]

Another update... 1/17/09

The Sacramento City Council recently voted to direct city staff to stop working with the company that had proposed a waste-to-energy plant.. citing concerns about the project's financial viability and technology.

An investigation also found that similar projects in other cities were floundering and that Sacramento officials did not delve deeply into the professional backgrounds of the people behind the Sacramento proposal"

-MJC

 

[brlewis]

I would like to comment about the lack of understanding for a low BTU syngas to produce energy. Misunderstanding comes from ingnorance about modern gas turbines. Ge has developed the F Class turbines to be able to operated on sygas as low as 135 Btu/scf. They have succesfully operated these turbines on syngas from coal gasification for years. The highest btu value that a syngas can have made with CO and H2 is a little over 300 Btu/scf if the gas was made with O2 and around 150 Btu/scf if made with Air. We call this air blown or oxygen blown gasification. These turbines also work with a mixture of syngas and natural gas. Alstom and Siemens also have gas turbines that run on syngas.
The problem with these turbine is that they are all in the 100 - 300 megawatt range. Any gasification plant would have to gasify 1000 to 3000 tons/day to feed these turbines.
That is the other problem. A prototype plant would have to be in this range because without the gas turbine there is no hope of making any ecomomics work. My estimate for a 3000 ton/day plant would be approx. 700 million for hard costs. Also to guarantee that a plant like this could be completed it would require another 200 million to be able to iron out the bugs once the plant is build.
I believe the technology is available and for a large plant which could produce more that a megawatt of electricty per ton or waste compared with a small thermal plant at less that 300 there are some locations that could economically support such a plant with tipping fees and electricity costs combined.

Also people need to understand that CO2 is a product of combustion and is only bad when we are burning fossil fuels. Once we create waste the carbon in the waste will eventually make its way to our atmosphere hopefully in the form of CO2 and not some other actually harmfull gas like an oxygenate hydrocarbon or methane like from MSW dump sites. It would be beneficial to be able to get some energy out of it first. An efficient msw plasma gasification plant would be able to increase the ratio of energy over the production of CO2. This would have the effect of lowering the CO2 produced from fossil fuels.

I would like to answer any question any one may have about gasificaton. There are alot of misconceptions out there.
How do I know. I have studied gasification for the last 8 years. My company is actively pursuing the financing of gasification. We have worked with alot of major technology companies like GE, Alsom, Siemens, Kabelco, Westinghouse Plasma and a short list of smaller companies with technologies that add up to a complete technology package.
That as I have said is not the problem financing is and once that is overcome this technology will become viable and maybe in the next 5 to 7 years.

The real question is "How do you finance a billion dollar project where that project is the prototype?"

 

[moltenmetal]

By the exact same logic, sequestered carbon is sequestered carbon: it doesn't matter whether the origin of the carbon is biological or man-made. Doesn't matter if it's wood that's used as a durable construction material, or non-compostable non recyclable waste stored in a dry landfill, or CO2 recompressed and shoved back into an oil formation- it all has the same effect.

You are correct that unsorted municipal waste is as risk of generating methane/CO2 by anaerobic degradation, making the greenhouse gas situation far worse than if we burned the waste. However, municipal waste with compostables and recyclables removed has a pretty low energy content, and very little propensity to generate methane/CO2 when buried in a dry landfill.

Even in a conventional "hole in the ground" landfill, while some biodegradation occurs, the bulk of the degradable waste is preserved. You can dig up newspapers from 100+ years ago and READ them. In the fully anaerobic portion of the waste column, you can even find readily degradable items like heads of broccoli that is 10+ years old and perfectly preserved. The local science centre has a lovely garbage column from a local landfill displayed in a glass vacuum/inert chamber which illustrates this fact very nicely.

 

[KENAT]

Is CO2 sequestering really the same as Carbon sequestering?

If you did enough of it is there any danger of depleting the oxygen in the atmosphere?

My guess is the amount of oxygen is so large than human kinds ability to pump some of it underground as part of CO2 wont make much difference. Then again supposedly we've underestimated man kinds impact on the environment before.

KENAT,

Have you reminded yourself of faq731-376 recently, or taken a look at posting policies:

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484

 

[moltenmetal]

Since the AGW problem results from too much CO2 in the atmosphere rather than too much C in the biosphere, removing that atmospheric CO2 (i.e. including one mole of O2 with every mole of C) shouldn't be a problem.

As to running out of oxygen, as long as we don't run out of water we're fine. Water is the electron donor most often used in photosynthesis- the oxygen liberated comes from the water.

 

[MJCronin]

brlewis...

If I understand your line of reasoning, the St. Lucie plant was proposed to be so large because of the available sizes for gas turbines..??

Is there a physical reason why that must be ? Must all low-btu fueled gas turbines be in the 100-300 MWe range..... or was that a business decision by the GT vendor ?

My original motive in starting this thread was pure purple outrage....

Outrage at non-qualified people making claims about power plant design..... an area where they seemed to know little.

Outrage at newspapers like USAToday that were happy to run articles about the massive 3000 tpd St. Lucie plant that could not possibly come to fruition.

Agreements...disgreements.....anyone ??

This and all of my above posts are simply my opinion.

-MJC

 

[brlewis]

That is correct. There are no more than a handful of combined cycle gas turbines that can operate on low btu syngas (CO & H2). They were developed because of the coal gasification industry. I should say that it was not so much that the turbine was developed but that the combustor was developed for these large capacity turbines.
As I said GE, Siemans and Alstom all have a few models.
The St. Lucie plant is developed around the Westinghouse plasma torch. Westinghouse plasma corp. spun off of Westinghouse when they fell apart. Westinghouse Plasma also developed a complete plasma gasification process, mostly just the gasification module which can be scaled up to 500 t/d. A 3000 t/d plant would require 6 of these.
The people a Westinghouse Plasma have been working on plasma gasification for 60 years. They are the PhD types. They never pursued complete plant design. However their process is being used at 2 gasification plants (steam only) in Japan and in numerous other process including vitrification and smelting.
We along with other groups have been working on a complete gasification process designed around the westinghouse gasifcation process.
We developed a plant design mostly theoretical but based on well developed and applied processes and we modeled the heat cycle with some expensive software.
Oh by the way we are not the people that developed the St. Lucie plant. They are however using a lot of our same concepts.
Personally I do not think that the St. Lucie plant will make it. Not because of their engineering but because the plant is under funded.
It is not hard to find qualified people to design a power plant. And there are a lot of companies out there that do just that.
I have seen a lot of projects fail not because of the engineering but because the project gets down to the end and they run out of money to finish the project. It takes money at the end of a project to make it work you might say. To resolve all of the little problems that occur. Lack of confidence will make money extremely hard to get at this point.
The technology approach that we have taken is the funding and the economics. We have determined that the economics will work only if you can get a fairly low heat rate from a plant. 10 and 12K heat rates from a steam process will never work economically. You have to have a combined cycle process with 40 to 50% efficiencies. You have to have good tipping fees from the waste and you have to have good power rates.
We have met with local and governmental officials in more than 30 locations around the world that have fair to good economics. Florida is not one of them.
We have concluded that a plant of this size is the prototype. It is so because you can not prove the economics otherwise.
The funding we figure for this size of first time prototype would need to be a billion dollars.
We have and are working with more that a dozen funding sources that are very promising and unique. Maybe we can do it and maybe not. The point I am making is it is not a technology or engineering problem.
I don't know who did the detailed plant design at St. Lucie but I do know that the process design is based on sound principles.
Our approach has been - Process design -Feasability - Funding -Detailed Engineering - Construction.
Their approach has been Process design - Detailed engineering - funding - feasability (or something like that). I know they are underfunded and it is not feasable to have a plant in but a few places in the United States and Florida is not one of them. They will not be able to service their debt.
I think that the future of engineering is and always will be to go were no one has gone before.
I could go on. Thank you for your questions. I hope I have been able to add some insight to this topic.

 

[TheTick]

Do I hear the ring of truth? Wait... NO, it's the splot of bull$#!+. Nothing about this sounds like a legitimate engineering undertaking.

You are obviously not serious about demonstrating this technology on a manageable scale. You only want more.

 

[KENAT]

Here's a question for you, what proportion of the waste fed into this type of system needs to be organic (or otherwise suitably energetic or whatever the correct term is) for there to be a net energy output?

I've heard a lot of reports about how a lot of municiple waste is rubble or other non combustable waste. How does this impact on the plasma process.

KENAT,

Have you reminded yourself of faq731-376 recently, or taken a look at posting policies:

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484

 

[MJCronin]

1) "That is the other problem. A prototype plant would have to be in this range because without the gas turbine there is no hope of making any ecomomics work."

A billion or nothing ...eh

Caterpillar Solar also offers low BTU gas turbines for many decades

2) "It is not hard to find qualified people to design a power plant"...."To resolve all of the little problems that occur."

Oh yeah.....right..... and when you tell someone to specify and purchase a compressor for highly corrosive high temperature syn gas, its his problem to find one...right?

Tell the designer and supplier of the Heat recovery Steam generators he is going to see corrosive conditions never encountered before.. No problem

As a manager you can always hold a meeting....get outraged...!! This plant is going to be like all the others...

3) "I don't know who did the detailed plant design at St. Lucie but I do know that the process design is based on sound principles."

Really....? I strongly believe that this is not true.

Where can we all review the heat balance and discuss the materials selection ? There are lots of smart people on these fora....!!!

C'mon....If you are so confident...pdf something, post it and we can talk about it

I smell MBA..... and perhaps a military background

 

[brlewis]

Typical MSW is approx 10 -12% inorganics, and up to 30% moisture, providing that the bulk organics like metal and concrete have been removed.
Typical waste has the ability to generate a megawatt per ton. This requires the following:
1. Typical MSW with no recycling i.e. plastic and paper included in the waste.
2. Low production of CO2. This represents lost energy.
3. High efficiency gas turbine combined cycle. i.e. F Class GE turbine
4. Gasification heat recovery.

The organics are converted to syngas N2, CO, CO2, H2, H2S, H2O, Ar, HCl, and other fuel type hydrocarbons equivalent to C2H4. Also there are small quantities of heavy metals and mercury.

The inorganics like metals and silicon are melted and vitrified into glass. No different than an iron smelting process.

Any waste can be processed into gas of glass or raw element. It is a question of economics. If a certain waste has a high btu value then the economics are in the production of power. If the waste has a high tipping fee then that is were the economics are. Some wastes are not economical to process. You have to look specifically at each one.
For example the law changed on hazardous waste, you now can thermally convert hazardous waste providing the fuel produced has a btu value greater than 8000 btu/lb.
The only way to do this is with a plasma process, and doing a water shift reaction. i.e. converting water and carbon into H2 and CO. This more energy. However this is economical because then you can charge $200 to $500 for that kind of waste.
I may not defend the St. Lucie project for reasons I have stated but I will defend plasma gasification as a viable concept that can be successfully engineered with current technology.
I appreciate your questions. They help me alot.

 

[TheTick]

Pseudo-military, MJ. Wannabe, perhaps? Most ex-military are far more sensible.

 

[brlewis]

MJCronin

I would like to talk about it. I would like to get out of the box and see if plasma gasification could be a feasable engineerable technology.
Maybe we should start a new thread.

 

[KENAT]

thread730-204617 was a thread just generally discussing the process rather than the Specific St Lucie proposal.

It's closed now but by all means start a new one referencing that one and this.

KENAT,

Have you reminded yourself of faq731-376 recently, or taken a look at posting policies:

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484

 

[brlewis]

Hey lets not make criticism without careful thought and aimed at a handy target for attack.
I am fairly new in this venue and would like to learn something.
I know that good engineering requires being critical of processes but does that include people. If so I would be glad to join in.
As for sound principles. That is more likely an exageration.
Is that better.
I am not military nor MBA.

 

[owg]

Please note that the site rules preclude "Irritating Other Members" .

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[MJCronin]

Two years ago:

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/the-ultimate-garbage-disposal

Two and a half years ago:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2006-09-10-vaporized-garbage_x.htm

Its a lot of fun being a journalist writing about new things and powers sources that will never exist....!!!!!!

You can say anything, quote anyone....make any claim and no one will ever call you to task on it.

WHERE ARE THE PLANTS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[brlewis]

It is hard to defending the St. Lucie project. They will most likely run out of money before the plant is ready to run. You can imagine the rage to think that someone would dare try to do what they are doing and call it engineering.
Let's look at the technology an see if it can be engineered.
First the plasma gasifier parameters. This particular gasifier has three sections. The lower section has to work like a smelter with a bed of coke that is heated to 5000 degF with plasma torches. This provides surface area for the reaction with the waste and processes the inorganics. The next section is bigger to handle the waste input, which is rammed in from the tipping floor. The organics are dried, pyrolysed and gasified. Then there is a freeboard section with enough volume to allow a 2-3 sec. residence time. This is where all the high temperature reactions take place. All compounds are disassociated and the available oxygen reacts with carbon to make CO. Hydrogen frees up. Some of the H2O reacts with carbon in a watershift reaction to make CO and H2. Sulfur reacts with hydrogen to make H2S. Clorine reacts with hydrogen to make HCl. There are no oxygenate hydrocarbons. They do not exist at this temperature. Air is also supplied to provide oxygen for these reactions. A gas in one particular situation might be as follows:
vol% wgt%
CO 23.51% 29.1926%
CO2 2.47% 4.8152%
N2 36.48% 45.3073%
Ar 0.43% 0.7649%
H2 14.81% 1.3238%
C2H4 1.31% 1.6328%
HCl 0.19% 0.3010%
H2S 0.07% 0.0993%
H2O 20.74% 16.5631%
Plus trace amounts of heavy metals, mercury and silica products. The waste that might produce this gas is as follows:

Newsprint 3.71%
Other Paper 19.48%
Food Waste 19.91%
Yard Waste 15.52%
Plastic 14.49%
Textiles 10.85%
Wood 3.84%
Rubber and Leather 0.66%
Metal 3.54%
Glass 2.60%
Other inorganic 5.40%


This reactor might be 10' dia at the bottom and 30'at the top and 60'tall. It will need to be lined with high temperature refractory material that will handle 2300 degF. The operating presure will be slightly negative.

Now for a little high temperature combustion theory. Combustion produces tars. There are three types. Primary, secondary and tertierary. Primary tars are a long list of really nasty stuff (oxygenated hydrocarbons) that start to break down above 600 degF. The secondary tars still have some of these compounds but above 1800 degF the tars that are left are considered to be fuels overall equivalant to C2H4 in ratio of carbon to hydrogen.

This reactor would have a waste feed of 500 t/d.
Coke at 24 t/d
Air at 654 t/d

Output
Syngas 1092 t/d LHV 2298 Btu/lb
Inorganic 86 t/d
This is an air blown plant. There is also an oxygen blown plant

Now my question. Without considering anything else, could I find a design for this reactor. Let's see hm there are hundreds of them. They may have different functions and be sized differently but the design approach would be the same.

Everyone has a lot of questions and opinions. Are the answers good enough when you get to the right level of detail? We shall see.