Waste Management, InEnTec form JV for 20,000 degree plasma gasification of waste into fuels, power; customers this year

In Oregon, Waste Management Inc. and InEnTec announced a joint venture, called S4 Energy Solutions, that will produce renewable fuel, power and industrial products as well as to generate electricity, using plasma gasification.

In plasma gasification, biomass is fed into a closed chamber and superheated to temperatures of up to 20,000 degrees fahrenheit. The intense heat transforms biomass into syngas, which is then reformulated using into ethanol and green diesel, hydrogen, methanol or methane. A secondary process can convert the base materials into other industrial chemicals.

S4 Energy Solutions’ initial focus will be to process medical and other segregated commercial and industrial waste streams. The company’s future commercialization plans may also include the processing of municipal solid waste once the technology has been demonstrated to be economical and scalable for such use. The S4 technology is designed with unique advances in plasma technology that increase the lifespan of high-cost elements such as the refractories.

Tests of the unit have shown that there is no creation of dangerous dioxins, and the process produces hydrogen and carbon monoxide in a 1:1 ratio, while recovering 50-70 percent of the BTUs in the waste.

The project gerew out of a collaboration between InEnTec and WMI’s Organic Growth Group, a corporate venture unit. The venture focused on plasma, as opposed to straight gasification, because the higher temperatures of the plasma process produce an ultra-clean syngas that more fully utilizes and destroys potentially dangerous waste, and because ultra-clean syngas is more useful in the commercial activity of producing high-end fuels and chemicals.

The technology of gasification is long established, but the plasma approach will allow WMI to expand its service offering to its current customer base by making certain types of waste easier to feasible handle. In addition, the fuel and power can be sold back to the waste client, reducing their overall cost of waste handling, WMI also expects that it will be able to expand its customer base with the plasma technology.

The technology will be based on a distributed generaiyon module – rather than large-scale facilities aggregating waste from mutliple client,s the venture will focus on smaller markets with modules designed to handle 5 to 125 tons per day. Clients can deploy multiple modules to handle more waste. The distributed approach allows WMI to offer an alternative to clients who have to long-haul waste, or whose waste is too toxic to safely transport.

Clients are expected initially to offtake all of the power and fuel for their own use, but S4 said it expects that some clients in the future, especially for those producing large amounts of fuel, will seek to sell the fuels in the open market for added revenue.

The group reports exceptional interest from the WMI client base and said that it expects to announce multiple projects in 2009. The group said that it will offer a mix of regional short-haul facilities serving multiple clients, or on site projects for single clients if volumes make that feasible.

The company said it may also pursue a model whereby a single-client site is eventually opened up to other suppliers of waste as a cost-reducer for the primary client and also to acquire useful waste streams useful for specific applications such as high-value chemicals.

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Waste Management, InEnTec form JV for 20,000 degree plasma gasification of waste into fuels, power; customers this year

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