Gasification of Solid Waste

I attended a presentation the other day which I found extremely interesting. It was a way to make the landfill a little "greener". The technology is called gasification. Basically, you take your typical munipal solid waste (household garbage) and dump it into a bio-reactor. The reactor burns up the garbage and produces 2 by-products: syngas and ash.

The syngas is a mixture of hydrogen gas, H2, and carbon monoxide, CO. The gas is burned to produce electricity to be used locally or sold back to the grid. The heat from burning the gas could be used in a district heating system, which basically heats water (or a mixture of water and glycol) in pipes which is used to heat nearby buildings. It's possible to build a network of insulated pipes to carry the heated water to building several kilometres away.

The solid ash that comes from this process can be used as filler for pavement or concrete. It may be possible to sell this by-product to paving companies. In any case, compared to the amount of solid going into the system, the ash is 10 times smaller in volume than garbage.

Our landfill in Grande Prairie brings in about 150 tonnes per day. Of that, only about 60 tonnes is household garbage and the rest is made up of construction and industrial waste. Other than tires, none of the other waste will burn up in this system. In addition, you wouldn't want to burn up wood or any organic waste that could become good compost. However, doing some quick math, we have the potential to turn 40% of our current landfill garbage into something usable right away and stretch out the lifespan of the landfill. If our current landfill has an estimated 25 years left, we have the potential to stretch out its life to 35 years. If we got really creative and started "trading" garbage with our regional partners, we could do even better. Why would they want to "trade" garbage with us? We would be taking the "smelly" garbage that is environmentally unpleasant and they would be taking the construction waste which is relatively inert and potentially resold at a profit. It's a win-win situation for everyone.

So what's the downside? We need to do a feasability study to determine whether or not the economic benefits offset the pricetag. In order to get into this kind of technology, we would have to be willing to invest in the neighborhood of $20 to $30 million. There are plenty of government grants for environmental initiative, so it may be possible to reduce the city's investment. I'm hoping that Council will fund the study and set us down this road.