Municipal Waste: Producing Everything That is Currently Produced by Oil

Municipal Waste – By: Dr. Aecio D’Silva, CEO, Moura Technologies and Dr. John Kyndt (Head Scientist of the Renewable Energy Program at MT – Advanced Energy Creations Lab).

Today we have clean and sustainable technologies to produce everything that we currently derive from crude petroleum (both fuels and petrochemicals) from a much more renewable source: solid municipal waste.

“This green energy source can be as close to us as the nearest garbage dumps and landfills, as related companies are developing viable and sustainable technologies to make fuel from municipal waste in our city every day”.

These systems should be envisioned as decentralized production and biorefineries that are situated nearby the feedstock production site.

Think about the millions of metric tons of waste we are producing per day in the US alone and all the chemicals and energy it took to produce these materials. With the right technology, we can recover these chemicals and reuse them in high value products again.

These cutting-edge technologies are turning renewable energy residues such as waste tires, used electricity poles, hospital and municipal solid urban waste and so on, into methanol, acetate, ethanol and synthesis gas. These can either be used as fuels themselves or further converted into higher value products.

For example acetate is one of the world’s most important chemicals and is used in a wide variety of industrial applications. It is a building block for many commodity chemicals used in daily life, like coatings, adhesives inks and cosmetics and PET plastics.

Municipal Waste – Syngas Production

Recyclables that are present in the waste stream are separated from municipal waste, collected and the remaining material is dried in rotary tubular systems and heated up to 500-600 degrees Celsius to break down into their basic components and emitting a synthesis gas rich in hydrogen.

Syngas can then be converted into ethanol by using chemical catalysts. Challenges are the economical scalability and lifetime of the catalysts.

Still at an R&D level, but with high potential to become cheaper and more scalable is the use of microorganisms to convert the syngas into higher value chemicals.

The heat generated during the process can be used in a cogeneration system for electricity, heat water and / or feed the system.

In essence these technologies that recover and reuse the basic chemical components over and over again (from waste to chemicals to waste again) have the potential of becoming the truly renewable source of our daily life products.

Related links:

• Flue Gas for Algae Cultivation: Curse or Blessing?
• Algae For Waste Water Treatment And BioFuel Production: A Double Winner
• Need For New Chemical Catalysts for the Conversion Of Syngas To Green Fuels
• Developing GE Thermophilic Bacteria for Syngas to Fuel Conversion
• Algae after Lipids: Plasma Arc Based Gasification to Green Fuels
• Energia Renovável: Gaseificação dos Resíduos Domésticos