Government Technology - January 2009 - (Page 47)

possibly make Sacramento the first American city to build a plasma gasification plant to treat waste. Greening With Garbage “Sacramento has long been on record as being a sustainable and green city,” said Jim Rinehart, Sacramento’s economic development manager. “So one of the notions to support that premise of making Sacramento, the most sustainable city in the nation was to look at our municipal solid waste activities and see if we can improve upon them.” Rinehart said in late 2007 the city issued an RFP for alternatives to the city’s existing wastemanagement policy. There were 11 respondents. One of them was USST, which proposed a plasma arc gasification procedure that would convert municipal solid waste to energy and products the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has deemed to be safe roadbed material — all with no or few emissions. Several gasification plants are already operating in Japan, gasifying up to 280 tons of solid waste every day. Of course, all this sounds too good to be true. Why aren’t we already doing it? David Prinzing, vice president and chief engineer of USST, said the holdup is due to the usual suspects: politics and economics. Sacramento] … all of the factors come into play and it really looks like the right time for the right technology in the right place.” Still, like all cities, Sacramento has its fair share of naysayers. Whether it’s failed extinguished. Matter’s mass is conserved. So we just recombine it. In a sense, it’s a form of recycling of the unrecyclable portion of the waste because we’re getting beneficial things — whether it’s energy from the breaking of “In high school, you learn about the three states of matter: solids, liquids and gas. This plasma arc gasification is a representation of what is called the fourth state of matter — plasma — which effectively is this very high temperature, ionized volt.” Jim Rinehart, economic development manager, Sacramento, Calif. Jim Rinehart, economic development manager, Sacramento, California “There are a lot of vested interests or special interest groups around municipal solid waste, and so introducing change can be difficult,” Prinzing said. “It takes time. Then, on the economics side, I think you have to have the right set of factors; the shipping fees, the purchase agreements must have the right rate (cents/kilowatt hour); and then also I think people have sort of ignored the opportunities around solid byproducts. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity there, so when we look at the economics for our project [in attempts to build a new basketball arena or a downtown skyscraper that blocks the City Council’s view of the state Capitol building, Sacramento has a knack for nipping progress in the bud. In fact, The Sacramento Bee recently ran an editorial that reflects the city’s tendency to forever consider itself San Francisco’s inferior sibling. “If the city were to embark on this plan, it would be moving from a decidedly low-tech approach to handling waste to an approach on the cutting edge of technology,” the editorialist wrote. “At the moment, Sacramento trucks its trash over the Sierra [Nevada] to a landfill in Nevada. It’s one thing to say that the city needs to stop doing that. It’s quite another to say that Sacramento’s ready to lead the world in the technology of trash.” Rinehart and Prinzing believe the city is ready. They say the unease some feel about plasma gasification could be soothed if people better understood how it works. “In high school, you learn about the three states of matter: solids, liquids and gas,” Rinehart explained. “This plasma arc gasification is a representation of what is called the fourth state of matter — plasma — which effectively is this very high temperature, ionized volt. So it breaks down to the atomic level, and then with a little cooling gets to the molecular nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, etc. That’s very effective, and it’s far different from anything oxidized that would be called ignition, combustion, fire or anything. It doesn’t create ash — it’s something different — but it’s easy to confuse because it’s a matter of degrees on the Celsius scale.” It dissociates atoms and breaks them down into their basics, Prinzing added. “Of course we know that matter is neither created nor those bonds that we can turn into electricity; or from producing transportation fuels, like ethanol and hydrogen for fuel cells. Then, with the solid product, you can make ceramic tiles and rock wool, which is a form of insulation. It makes excellent roadbed. It’s not exactly a high-value output for that, but there are other things you can do to take advantage of this. So really, it’s like the ultimate form of recycling.” Input vs. Output For a plasma gasification plant to succeed, it must do one critical thing: produce more value in its output than it takes to operate it. The negotiations between the USST and Sacramento currently call for a plant that can handle 750 metric tons of municipal solid waste each day. A steam turbine and a gas turbine would combine to produce 66 megawatts (MW) of electricity. The plant itself would require 13 MW to operate, leaving the city with a 53-MW surplus it could sell back into the power grid. In California, the demand on cities to recycle keeps increasing. The state’s cities must, by law, recycle half their trash. Rinehart said he doesn’t want to change Sacramento’s recycling plans. Instead, he thinks plasma gasification can significantly increase the amount of waste the city can recycle. “California right now has legislation that all cities are to recycle at least 50 percent of their municipal waste,” he said. “Everything that is being considered for this technology is post-diversion. So this is all for material that would have gone to the landfill, not the recyclable bin.” 37 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2009

Government Technology - January 2009 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for... Stemming the Retirement Tide Getting the Picture Fact of Matter Money Trail Rays the Roof Trick or Tweet? The Modern Way to Vote Products signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2009

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