Just the other day I was talking with a colleague at work about how it would be nice to recycle everything in a tiny building that we were tearing down at school. We lamented about how hard it is to do this. I then made some random comment about a plasma technology that I had read about a few years ago that would melt almost any garbage into a usable strong building material. I had never heard anything more about it so I assumed it was still in the prototype phase. Then today I read at CBC an article about a plasma recycling plant that can convert 1 tonne of garbage into: 1.4 MWh of power, 300 litres of clean drinkable water, 5-10 kg of commercial salt, 150 kg of durable construction aggregate, and 5 kg of sulfur based fertilizer. It does all of this while producing almost no greenhouse gases.
The company is called PlascoEnergy Group and they have started their first prototype plant in Ottawa. It is going to divert 85 tonnes of garbage from the landfill each day. Since this is the prototype they do not quite get all the results that they expect. It turns out that the plant will produce a constant 4 MW so only 96MWh instead of the expected 119 from the above list. The rest of the products are still expected. So I started to wonder how long it would take before this plant paid for itself.
This prototype plant cost 27 million they said. Assuming that they can sell the power at the Saskatchewan cost of 9.38 cents per kWh. This is a little higher then the rates in Ottawa but it is green power and many people are willing to pay those few cents extra for green power. They should be able to make $9,004/day from power alone. They will probably also be paid a certain amount per tonne of garbage that they handle for the city. They can also sell the water, aggregate, salt and fertilizer. Lets assume that they make about 15,000/day They need to pay for their employees at the facility. Lets assume 20 guys at 20.00/hour after all it is a fairly small facility. That means 3,200 in wages. Maintenance costs of about 2,000 a day on average (obviously some days will be much higher and some much lower). Also the plant only runs 340 days a year. (25 maintenance days) That means that each year they will gross about 5.1 million and have costs of about 1.9 million. So they will make about 3.2 million a year. This means that it will take about 9 years to pay it off. This is a fairly good turn around time as I expect that the plant lifetime will be anywhere from 20 - 40 years.
So who wants one? Well that is kinda the whole point of this project. They hope to show that it works and then they can shop it around. They apparently have a potential customer in L.A. who produces about 11,000 metric tons of garbage. If all of this were converted to power that is a potential power supply of 12,423MWhs or a constant output of 517MW. That is a decent size power plant. It won't provide all of the power for LA. which once set a record of 22, 622MW required but it would at least provide power for about 336,000 homes.
I think that this technology will have a huge future. Let me know what you think.
5 comments:
Chris, this is a wonderful idea but your numbers are a little off. The value of this is as garbage disposal vs. power production. The plant must be compared to conventional power production costs for power production purposes. On a quick estimate if you use the labour costs of a typical utility (including benefits and over head and overtime) the average cost is about $70.00/hr not $20. Labour just shot up to $2.7 M/yr. Your cost of construction is $6.7M/MW compared to the typical $1M/MW for a conventional plant. Using your costs but subbing in the actual labour costs gives expense of $4.8 M/year with income of $5.1 M. Your profit is $300,000/year. Payback is now 90 years on a plant that may be designed for 50. Sorry but I am not investing as a power plant. As garbage disposal though it is a great idea.
Dad
Chris, I went a read the article and it is a little misleading in one way. The garbage is processed to produce "syngas". This is a very similar process to coal gassification where "syngas" is also produced. This releases no greenhouse gasses to the environment. What this article fails to note is that when this syngas is burnt/used in the gas turbine later to produce electricity it relases the same amount of CO2 and CO to the atmosphere as a natural gas turbine. Chemistry dictates that if carbon is combined with oxygen in the burning process CO2 must be produced.
Again though, this is a wonderful process for getting rid of garbage and recovering the energy that was put into producing it in the first place. As technology improves and if they used a CO2 capture plant such as the one being developed at the U of R and captured the CO2 rather than discharging it, then it will be really promising.
Sorry to dampen your enthusiasm about this, it is just not quite there yet.
Dad
Dad
Thanks for the explanations Dad. After reading your numbers I can see what you are saying about this being a good garbage disposal but lousy power plant. Although if someone threw away a lot of coal. . .
It's nice people are trying to figure out what to do with garbage.
Speaking of garbage, you've been tagged.
Interesting idea! To complete the analysis one has to compare the costs of the plasma plant to conventional garbage disposal i.e. landfilling or incineration. Also, costs of a prototype are likely higher than a more standard facility with less unknowns.
dan m
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