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‘Trashy’ no dirty word in energy production
 

By Stan Maddux

Indiana Correspondent

GARY, Ind. — If things go according to plan, Indiana will become home to the nation's second commercial-scale plant converting household garbage to fuel. Fulcrum BioEnergy, Inc. plans to begin construction of a $600 million plant at Gary in 2020.

The company has already started building the country's first commercial-scale trash-to-fuels plant outside Reno, Nevada. Fulcrum is using licensed technology from petroleum refiner BP and scientists at JM in a partnership between the firms to make fuel out of household waste before the trash ends up in landfills.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb welcomed the company to the “Steel City,” a community that has suffered a population decline from 150,000 to 70,000 residents over the past half-century. In addition to providing jobs for a once-thriving northwestern Indiana city built long ago on steel, he said Fulcrum BioEnergy brings the latest advancements in technology to help with the longstanding issue of waste disposal.

"The state's strong roots in manufacturing paired with an emerging tech sector make Indiana the ideal destination for innovative companies like Fulcrum that are developing 21st century solutions and changing the way we address today's challenges," he noted.

Rick Barraza, vice president of administration for Fulcrum, said municipal garbage brought into the biorefinery will not be burned. Instead, the material will be gasified through use of heat, pressure and moisture once all of the recyclables and inorganic items such as dirt, rocks and glass are removed from the waste stream.

Gasification will convert the trash into a synthetic gas consisting of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbon dioxide, he said. The synthetic gas will then be purified and processed to produce a syncrude product for upgrading into a cleaner-burning jet fuel or diesel.

Since no burning is involved, Barraza claimed plant emissions will contain in excess of 80 percent fewer greenhouse gases than what’s released from the production of traditional petroleum-based fuel.

According to company officials, construction will take about 18-24 months to complete. The specific location for the Gary plant has not been chosen, Barraza said. "We are finalizing the site selection.”

Approximately 700,000 tons of household waste from municipalities in the Greater Chicago area will be converted into 33 million gallons of fuel annually, officials said. There will be 160 full-time jobs at the plant.

"Our objective is to create jobs while raising the city’s assessed valuation. With a significant capital investment and noteworthy job creation, Fulcrum is a great example of the success of these efforts," said Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson.

Barraza said construction of the plant in Nevada should be finished early in 2020. That facility is projected to convert 170,000 tons of municipal garbage into fuel annually.

The Indiana Department of Environmental Management reported the company had not yet applied for a permit to operate its planned Gary facility, at press time. For that reason, the agency did not offer further comment. However, Barraza said the Fischer-Tropsch process for converting trash into fuel by his company has been used elsewhere for a long time.

"The gasification, Fischer-Tropsch, and other technologies utilized in our process are not new. They have been in commercial use for decades and have demonstrated their safety," he explained.

The process, relying on a series of chemical reactions, was first developed in 1925 in Germany. According to researchers, the country used the technology during World War II to produce about 9 percent of its war related fuels and 25 percent of its automobile fuel.

The technology seems to have advanced to the point of becoming an emerging major source of fuel. Apparently, though, a major challenge has been the cost of production competing with the cost of making traditional fossil fuel.

In 2010, for example, British Airways signed a deal to use 16 million gallons of jet fuel made from municipal trash at a bioenergy plant near London. According to a story published by Greenair Communications, the deal with Solena Fuels fell through before construction of the plant started because the $50 per barrel price of oil at the time made traditional fuel cheaper than what the bioenergy firm could offer.

Plans are in the works for similar low-emissions garbage to fuel plants elsewhere in Europe as part of the European Union's ongoing commitment to become more energy-independent and reduce greenhouse gases, according to an article published by Waste Management World.

Presently, natural gas and coal are being converted through a similar process into diesel and jet fuel at a demonstration plant near Tulsa, Okla. In 2006, fuel from that plant was reported to have been burned in a B-52 bomber during a seven-hour test flight deemed a success by the U.S military. The federal departments of Energy and Transportation have also tested extensively the natural gas derived as low in sulfur fuel.

According to researchers at the European Synchrotron in France, the Fischer-Tropsch process is one of the more viable alternatives to fuel production that likely will play an increasing role in meeting future energy needs. A similar process converting hydrocarbons from petro chemical plants into fuel is used in Southeast Asia and South Africa, according to the ES researchers.

Municipal trash is already used heavily in countries like Sweden and Norway to produce electricity and heat. That garbage is burned to produce energy. Sweden, in fact, reportedly imports trash from neighboring countries because of how heavily the country uses garbage to meet its energy needs.

1/16/2019