• 3 minutes e-car sales collapse
  • 6 minutes America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide
  • 11 minutes Perovskites, a ‘dirt cheap’ alternative to silicon, just got a lot more efficient
  • 3 hours GREEN NEW DEAL = BLIZZARD OF LIES
  • 7 days If hydrogen is the answer, you're asking the wrong question
  • 21 hours How Far Have We Really Gotten With Alternative Energy
  • 11 days Biden's $2 trillion Plan for Insfrastructure and Jobs

Breaking News:

Hess Board Recommends Merger With Chevron

Taras Berezowsky

Taras Berezowsky

Taras is a writer for MetalMiner who operate the largest metals-related media site in the US according to third party ranking sites. With a preemptive…

More Info

Premium Content

Syngas: Vaporizing Waste into Fuel

In the constant push to make greening technology not only effective but also profitable, one US company is taking advantage of a Japanese-pioneered innovation: using souped-up plasma torches to vaporize waste into fuel. The result of the plasma process is syngas, which is short for “synthetic gas” (or “synthesis gas”), a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can be burned to generate electricity.

As brought to our attention by a piece in the Economist, this process is becoming quite a business these days. The synthesis of syngas used to be pricey back when it was primarily used to get rid of heavy toxic waste such as oil sludge – “costing as much as $2,000 per tonne of waste, according to SRL Plasma, an Australian firm that has manufactured torches for 13 of the roughly two dozen plants around the world that work this way.” But now, prices have come down, and an effort led by Hilburn Hillestad of Atlanta, Ga.-based company Geoplasma has figured out how to create electricity from of the vaporization process by tweaking the , creating a dual-win proposition – reducing landfill waste while providing additional value.

According to the Economist article, the metals that make this possible are nickel-based alloys that comprise the pair of electrodes in a plasma torch:

“A current arcs between them and turns the surrounding air into a plasma by stripping electrons from their parent atoms. Waste (chopped up into small pieces if it is solid) is fed into this plasma. The heat and electric charges of the plasma break the chemical bonds in the waste, vaporizing it. Then, if the mix of waste is correct, the carbon and oxygen atoms involved recombine to form carbon monoxide and the hydrogen atoms link up into diatomic hydrogen molecules. Both of these are fuels (they burn in air to form carbon dioxide and water, respectively).”

According to an article in Biomass Magazine, which had already extensively reported on the MSW (municipal solid waste) vaporization, “about 12 commercial plasma waste processing facilities have been operating in Europe and North America, and about 10 in Asia” over the past several years. “The waste processed at these facilities varies and ranges from MSW to medical waste, catalytic converters, asbestos and ammunition.” Geoplasma, in fact, is planning to build the world’s largest facility in St. Lucie County, Fla., for $425 million, that will power about 25,000 homes. (Geoplasma has a deal with Westinghouse Plasma Corp. to provide the plasma torches and gasification reactors; that company’s equipment is used in two waste processing plants in Japan and in a GM plant in Ohio to melt scrap.)

If it works as efficiently as touted, this phenomenon has huge implications for cost-and-space-saving in the US, Canada and across Asia. Although more detail has yet to come to the surface, plasma-based “garbage burning” technologies could be one of the most efficient cost-benefit green innovations.

By. Taras Berezowsky

MetalMiner is the largest metals-related media site in the US according to third party ranking sites. With a preemptive global perspective on the issues, trends, strategies, and trade policies that will impact how you source and/or trade metals and related metals services, MetalMiner provides unique insight, analysis, and tools for buyers, purchasing professionals, and everyone else for whom metals and their related markets matter.


Download The Free Oilprice App Today

Back to homepage





Leave a comment

Leave a comment




EXXON Mobil -0.35
Open57.81 Trading Vol.6.96M Previous Vol.241.7B
BUY 57.15
Sell 57.00
Oilprice - The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News