Waste-to-Energy reduces landfilling, increases recycling, powers society and avoids blackouts
Paul Driessen
After years of opposing them, but facing constituents increasingly angry about rising electricity prices, New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently gave grudging support for two new Williams Companies natural gas pipelines.
Assuming they clear new hurdles, the Constitution Pipeline will transport gas 100+ miles from northeastern Pennsylvania fracking fields toward Albany. The 23-mile Northeast Supply Enhancement Pipeline will connect New York to the New Jersey segment of the Transco Pipeline, America’s largest-volume natural gas pipeline system, and carry enough gas to heat 2.3 million homes.
Hochul, other state Democrats and environmental activists have long stymied the projects, using exaggerated and fabricated water quality and climate change arguments – and fanciful expectations that heavily subsidized solar panels and onshore and offshore wind turbines can provide enough affordable electricity, enough of the time, to meet steadily increasing New York City and State power demands.
In exchange, the Trump Administration will let them continue installing gigantic offshore wind turbines that will generate 9,000 MW of electricity (less than one-third of what the state needs on hot summer days) perhaps 30-40% of the year … and be supported by fire-prone grid-scale batteries that would provide statewide backup power for about 45 minutes.
New gas turbines would help avoid blackouts, ensure that poor families freeze less often in winter and swelter less in summer, and help the state meet power needs that are soaring because of data centers, artificial intelligence, and legislatively mandated conversions from gasoline and gas to electric vehicles, stoves, and home and water heating.
They could also help reduce the need to import electricity from Canada and other states: some 36,000 gigawatt-hours (11% of statewide electricity) annually.
But legislators want to put another hurdle in the way. New legislation would force homes and businesses to pay $10,000 or more to connect to natural gas lines. If Gov. Hochul signs the bill, or the legislature overrides a veto, few or no new customers would take advantage of the new gas.
It’s a kill switch, reflecting the state’s determination to impose “climate leadership” and “protect communities” from alleged dangers from fossil fuels.
It’s also hypocritical and irresponsible. New York doesn’t just import electricity; it also exports garbage.
New York City generates nearly eight million tons of waste annually. Its last municipal incinerator closed in 1990; its last municipal landfill in 2001. City trash is now mostly sent on barges, trucks and trains to landfills (80%) and incinerators (20%) in New Jersey, Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia, Ohio and South Carolina! NY State exports 30% of its garbage.
The city and state could address both garbage and electricity challenges by using natural gas to power waste-to-energy (WTE) generating plants that burn trash, thereby reducing the need to landfill or export garbage, while increasing recycling, producing reliable, affordable, much-needed electricity, and reducing blackout risks that are climbing every year.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, a WTE or resource recovery facility operated by Reworld Waste burns home, business, industrial and other garbage that doesn’t go straight into recycling programs and would typically be landfilled, including myriad extraneous plastics. The trash is dumped in a receiving area, sorted for unacceptable materials like rocks, mixed thoroughly, and burned with natural gas in a chamber at 2000 degrees F for up to two hours, until it’s totally combusted to ash.
The heat converts water to steam, which is super-heated in tubes to drive turbines that generate electricity: 80 megawatts 24/7, enough for about 52,000 homes. Depending on its composition, a ton of waste generates 550-700 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
Since opening in 1990, the plant’s trash has replaced the equivalent of burning 2,000,000 barrels of oil for electricity every year.
Glass from lightbulbs and other nonrecyclable sources becomes part of the ash stream, from which ferrous and nonferrous metals are recovered. Most of the remaining ash is used as a substitute for sand and aggregates in road and building construction, cement and cinder block production, and manufacturing other building materials.
Unsold ash is landfilled but, by the time the metals are removed, only about 10% of the original trash bulk and 25% of its original weight is left.
Even staples, paper clips, bottle caps, metal light bulb bases, aluminum foil, and wires from spiral notebooks and furnace filters can be “recycled” this way. In fact, enough iron, steel, aluminum, copper and other metals are recovered from the resultant ash at the Fairfax facility to build 20,000 automobiles annually.
However, plastic-metal-glass waste (computers, monitors, keyboards, printers, microwaves), broken pots and pans, household appliances and other larger refuse should go to special “white goods” and metal recycling centers.
Lime neutralizes acids in the airstream, activated carbon controls heavy metals, and fabric filter bags remove particulates, keeping air emissions below EPA standards. The scrubber waste (fly ash) is then dewatered and chemically stabilized, before being landfilled or used in construction materials.
Process steam condenses back into water and is reused. Water from the wastes and scrubbers is recovered, treated and used to cool the facility and equipment.
Two other trash-to-energy facilities serve the Washington, DC area; 75 across the USA generate over 2,500 MW of electricity. However, more WTE plants could help solve garbage, energy, landfill and pollution problems in metropolitan areas across the country (and worldwide), including:
* Philadelphia, PA – 1,300,000 tons per year of municipal solid waste (MSW), but only one WTE;
* Chicago, IL – 3,100,000 tpy, but just one WTE plant (other proposed facilities were rejected);
* Houston, TX – 4,200,000 tpy, with one WTE facility;
* Phoenix, AZ – 1,000,000 tpy, and one WTE facility;
* Los Angeles, CA – 4,000,000 tpy, but again only one WTE facility.
New York and other jurisdictions that have rejected natural gas and waste-to-energy/resource-recovery facilities are missing enormous opportunities to address challenges that will only become worse. They’re also dumping their own local responsibilities into their neighbors’ backyards.
These facilities ensure secure, affordable electricity generation close by, without the need for expensive backup power and multi-hundred-mile transmission lines to part-time wind and solar power.
They utilize fuels that America still has in abundance: gas and trash. And they reduce the need for resources that are in increasingly short supply: landfill space, cropland and wildlife habitats impacted, and bird, bat and other wildlife lost due to wind, solar and transmission installations.
From my perch, these clear and significant benefits clearly offset the cost and subsidy concerns that some have raised about WTE facilities.
Metro areas and states should apply pragmatism, reality and these benefits when reconsidering climate and “renewable” energy ideologies that have dominated public policies for far too long.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental protection and human rights.
Burning Trash for Energy
Are wind turbine blades burnable.? At least that would be guaranteed, but rather expensive source.
Fiberglass, maybe. Balsa, definitely.
Burning non-recyclable trash to produce energy is a very pragmatic, efficient, and sensible way to dispose of the trash. Unfortunately, such incinerators release carbon dioxide, which is very expensive to capture and store, so politicians who believe that C02 is a pollutant, will likely not agree to this method of disposing of trash, just as they do not agree to the construction of new coal-fired plants.
The politicians do not seem to realise that organic material in landfill sites eventually breaks down to produce methane, which they also demonise as a greenhouse gas.
A local landfill site in Somerset captures the methane and uses it to run generators, so the CO2 is still produced but over a longer time scale and there aren’t the side benefits of recycling metals and producing a useful by-product of fly ash.
If they go to landfill they’ll decompose eventually, which will release CO2.
Pry tell what is actually recyclable? In almost every case burning is more efficient and less environmentally impactful than recycling. Glass and paper being the only possible exceptions.
Within the trash are metals, copper, aluminum, steel, that are recovered and recycled.
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There are things that, once you have touched them, you usually don’t think the word “recycle”. The blue plastic sausage roll from the Diaper Genie was … exquisite.
Let’s also not forget that these WTE facilities also produce dispatchable reliable electricity 24/7 365 day a year, unlike solar and wind.
The UKs Sheffield Energy Recovery Facility, at Bernard Road, has been doing this since the 1970s, & the new (2006) plant produces hot water for the District Energy network.
The incinerator burns 120,000 tonnes of municipal waste each year, producing up to 60MW of thermal energy and up to 21MW of electrical energy.
The steam that is created from burning the waste is converted to high temperature hot water for the community energy network, providing heat to over 2,800 homes and 150 public and private buildings via a network of underground pipes including the Lyceum Theatre, Millennium Galleries, The Crucible, Weston Park Hospital and Sheffield City Hall.
Probably not advisable for the NY legislature to mess with Trump on the gas hookups if they want to see their offshore bird choppers. I’d like to see them try, purely for entertainment value.
All of the technologies have existed for at least 40 years to take unsorted municipal waste and raw sewage, run it all through one plant, and output metals, clean water, and optionally assorted plastic, glass, and petrochemicals.
Shred the waste *before* burning then run it past magnets and eddy current generators on a conveyor (as depicted in the graphic above). Liquid that runs out of the shredder could be put into settling tanks to stratify with water + water solubles on the bottom and insolubles (which tend to be lighter than water) on top. Drain the water off the bottom and the oils and chemicals off the top could be burned or sold to refineries.
The water would then be strained for chunks then run through a 2 stage distillation process to separate water from things that have a higher and lower vapor temperature than water. Those contaminants would be dealt with according to whatever they are. Burn if flammable, or add to refinery feedstock.
The water would then be used to separate the plastics. Some plastics sink, some float. There’s an easy separation step. The sinkers can then be sorted by pumping different sizes of bubbles through the mix of water and plastic. Different bubble sizes stick to different types of plastic and can float small pieces.
For the burner fuel, mix clay with the organic waste and sewage then extrude it into chunky pellets. Dry those then they get fed into the bottom of cone shaped cyclonic burners. As the chunks of burnable stuff embedded in the clay pellets burns out, they get lighter and spiral up the cone (driven by swirling forced air) and out the top to be collected.
To cool the hot and burnt out pellets, run them through a heat recovery tunnel. That heat would be used to help dry the fresh pellets and provide heat to other parts of the process between the shredder input and the burners. Same deal with the exhaust. Run it through heat exchangers to save that energy for other uses like finishing cleanup of the water output.
To control smells, all the burner intake air should be drawn in through the shredder feed area. Any stinky vapors go directly into the super hot burners.
What to do with the fired clay pellets? They’d be excellent as asphalt and concrete aggregate due to their porosity and high surface area to bond with the bitumen or cement. They should be good for road base mixed with sand. Unlike plain gravel the sand could get a better ‘grip’ on them due to all the holes.
None of this is new technology. I though of putting this all together in the late 1980’s when I was a teenager. I’m 54 now. I typed it up and sent copies to some people who should have been interested but all they wanted to know was if I had an engineering degree. Engineering is their job to figure out how to make the concept as a whole work.
Every large landfill could have a plant like this and become a source for usable materials, clean water, and electricity – instead of a hole into which valuable stuff is tossed forever. Abandoned landfills could become mines full of highly concentrated resources. Design one of these plants to be easily taken apart and moved after the landfill is mined out.
My employer once closed down a smelter that produced copper and gold from sulphide ores in the middle of Australia.
It could have been converted to waste processing at reasonable cost, but it was killed because it was too far from population centers that produced most waste.
OTOH, suggestions to put waste processors inside city limits have been killed because they might make the air toxic.
There are plenty of creative minds to generate objections to all kinds of reasonable suggestions, but the tragedy of demonising CO2 has killed many of them as a cover-all for protest. Thanks to mass media and lousy education systems that teach this objection to youngsters so they can be activists as they mature, as if that was a normal development past puberty.
Objection on waffle grounds is nothing more than petulant tears and sobs that are not very important in the real scheme of things. Geoff S
I once worked on a mobile PCB incinerator. It went from waste to ware site. If I remember it was it was 4 tractor trailers. They hooked all together ran it for a few months and moved on. This was the early 80s
Waste incineration is the best way to handle trash. In my home state (Carinthia in Southern Austria) around 2000 the city of Arnoldstein agreed to the construction of a waste incineration facility for the whole state. Arnoldstein back then was an ugly city with depressing mood. The mining and processing industry of lead and zinc (for centuries the biggest lead mine of Central Europe in Bad Bleiberg), which dominated the local economy, had just collapsed and left the city riddled with unemployment. The miners and workers all had gotten a certain amount of coal for free as part of their work contracts, making coal heating almost the only source of heating and contributing to the ugly cities outlook.
After start of the waste incineration in 2004 (and fade out of some NIMBY protests over the years) Arnoldstein nowadays is a nice looking city with a reliable district heating, fired by the waste incineration and Carinthia was able to close almost all waste deposits.
Waste incineration will come to be seen as the only way to handle trash responsibly. It is inevitable.
Only in high population areas though. Volume is key, and at some point, trucking costs kill it financially.
Surely not if state-of-the-art electric trucks are used?
(Just in case –
/sarc)
It does not need to be trucks.
Rail roads.
I wonder if a locomotive steam engine can run effectively on trash.
It would require a level of sorting prior to transport.
If available, yes. But that’s a big if. No, running a train by burning trash would not be feasible.
True, but not to all. The ideologically shackled will always find a way to object, protest, obstruct. For 2 reasons. First, they lack critical thinking skills (an open mind). Second, it does not stroke their egos, promote their desired celebrity status, or get them likes on social media.
Starship Enterprise economics – if you envision a world where energy is abundant and nearly free, then everything becomes convenient and disposable.
Europe has been doing this for decades in many places. My mother’s home city of Salzburg had burning waste boilers supplying hot water to the city through most of her lifetime. It’s just added to the local taxes.
I believe it’s commercially uneconomical to date. Apart from that, excellent suggestion. Any CO2 produced will be warmly welcomed by plants. Win-win, apart from the cost.
during my engineering education in Bavaria my class visited such a trash burning facility. I do remember their statement that cost and income are balanced evenly.
There was another project many years ago that process organics with high pressure and temperature. The output was water and light oil. In the residue were other materials that were recovered.
Perdue decided that the processing plant would have to buy the carcasses. The local government struck down the tax exemptions. The facility moved to Europe. I do not know if it is still operating.
Yes, this was not economically able to stand on its own. I wonder how much Perdue has to pay for waste disposal.
Uneconomical? It depends, the drier the trash the less oil/gas/coal you have to add to it’s combustion. The generated heat can either produce electricity or provide centralized heating for entire city blocks or hospitals.
You can achieve a ROI but it depends on the location where you place and with what you feed the trash burning plant. The closer to the big cities the better.
Well I lived for over 30 years near one of these burners, it kept our garbage fees down…then seperating trash and pseudo recycling became fashion. The plant still works fine, just the operating costs exploded due to the absence of flammable plastic in the trash..and so did the garbage fees.
Doing proper math has never been any ecotard’s forte.
The Virginia City of Alexandria, adjacent to Fairfax County has operated a trash to power facility since 1988 to combust about 1,000 tons of trash per day from the city and the adjacent County of Arlington. It generates about 12 MW of electricity.
Bravo!
347 words before we get to “trash”. WUWT?
A brilliant idea, as usual plagued with the same flaw: people.
Germans broadly backed back in the days the idea that trash should be burned. Sadly many projects ran into delaying and paralyzing lawsuits of local activists.
Burning trash is great, but we don’t want the plant on our turf.
Well since the idea seperating trash and enable it’s “recycling” is so much more expensive and marketable everyone is buying it..lol. So yes, plastic gets seperated and instead of being efficiently burned it’s being shipped to third world countries to fill up their landfills.
Brilliant, or not? effoff ecotards
“shipped to third world countries to fill up their landfills.”
->
“shipped to third world countries to fill up their landfills” and dumped overboard once it’s over the horizon if that’s more profitable “.”
There are two kinds of people in the world:
Historically, the only things worth recycling were newsprint, cardboard boxes, and aluminum cans. Newspapers are dying, so only boxes and cans remain. At least as far as household trash.
I thought NYC sent its trash on a barge to sea- not terribly far from the city. And that it’s caused a large dead zone.
This kind of reminds me of the plasma furnaces (plasma pyrolysis) process to incinerate waste products. The plasma furnace can split the waste products into its constituent elements (most waste products anyway) and could output syngas for industrial purposes.