St. Lucie County Solid Waste Director Leo Cordeiro,
left, and Assistant Director Ron Roberts, right, pose at
the St. Lucie County landfill in Fort Pierce, Fla.,
Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2006. Atlanta-based Geoplasma has a
grand plan to build a 5 million plant here that will turn
3,000 tons of garbage a day into synthetic gas and steam
to power homes and production lines. (AP Photo/Lynne
Sladky)
(AP) -- A Florida county has grand plans to ditch its dump,
generate electricity and help build roads - all by
vaporizing garbage at temperatures hotter than parts of the
sun.
The $425 million facility expected to be built in St. Lucie County will
use lightning-like
plasma arcs to turn trash into gas and rock-like material.
It will be the first such plant in the nation operating on
such a massive scale and the largest in the world.
Supporters say the process is cleaner than traditional trash
incineration, though skeptics question whether the
technology can meet the lofty expectations.
The 100,000-square-foot plant, slated to be operational in two
years, is expected to vaporize 3,000 tons of garbage a day.
County officials estimate their entire landfill - 4.3 million
tons of trash collected since 1978 - will be gone in 18 years.
No byproduct will go unused, according to Geoplasma, the
Atlanta-based company building and paying for the plant.
Synthetic, combustible gas produced in the process will be
used to run turbines to create about 120 megawatts of
electricity that will be sold back to the grid. The facility
will operate on about a third of the power it generates, free
from outside electricity.
About 80,000 pounds of steam per day will be sold to a
neighboring Tropicana
Products Inc. facility to power the juice plant's
turbines.
Sludge from the county's wastewater treatment plant will be
vaporized, and a material created from melted organic matter -
up to 600 tons a day - will be hardened into slag, and sold
for use in road and construction projects.
"This is sustainability in its truest and finest form," said
Hilburn Hillestad, president of Geoplasma, a subsidiary of
Jacoby Development Inc.
For years, some waste-management facilities have been
converting methane - created by rotting trash in landfills -
to power. Others also burn trash to produce electricity.
But experts say population growth will limit space available
for future landfills.
"We've only got the size of the planet," said Richard Tedder,
program administrator for the Florida Department of
Environmental
Protection's solid waste division. "Because of all of the
pressures of development, people don't want landfills. It's
going to be harder and harder to site new landfills, and it's
going to be harder for existing landfills to continue to
expand."
The plasma-arc gasification facility in St. Lucie County, on
central Florida's Atlantic Coast, aims to solve that problem
by eliminating the need for a landfill. Only two similar
facilities are operating in the world - both in Japan - but
are gasifying garbage on a much smaller scale.
Up to eight plasma arc-equipped cupolas will vaporize trash
year-round, nonstop. Garbage will be brought in on conveyor
belts and dumped into the cylindrical cupolas where it falls
into a zone of heat more than 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
"We didn't want to do it like everybody else," said Leo
Cordeiro, the county's solid waste director. "We knew there
were better ways."
No emissions are released during the closed-loop gasification,
Geoplasma says. The only emissions will come from the
synthetic gas-powered turbines that create electricity. Even
that will be cleaner than burning coal or natural gas, experts
say.
Few other toxins will be generated, if any at all, Geoplasma
says.
But critics disagree.
"We've found projects similar to this being misrepresented all
over the country," said Monica Wilson of the Global Alliance
for Incinerator Alternatives.
Wilson said there aren't enough studies yet to prove the
company's claims that emissions will likely be less than from
a standard natural-gas power plant.
She also said other companies have tried to produce such
results and failed. She cited two similar facilities run by
different companies in Australia and Germany that closed after
failing to meet emissions standards.
"I think this is the time for the residents of this county to
start asking some tough questions," Wilson said.
Bruce Parker, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based
National Solid Wastes Management Association, scoffs at the
notion that plasma technology will eliminate the need for
landfills.
"We do know that plasma arc is a legitimate technology, but
let's see first how this thing works for St. Lucie County,"
Parker said. "It's too soon for people to make wild claims
that we won't need landfills."
Louis Circeo, director of Georgia Tech's plasma research
division, said that as energy prices soar and landfill fees
increase, plasma-arc technology will become more affordable.
"Municipal solid waste is perhaps the largest renewable energy
resource that is available to us," Circeo said, adding that
the process "could not only solve the garbage and landfill
problems in the United States and elsewhere, but it could
significantly alleviate the current energy crisis."
He said that if large plasma facilities were put to use
nationwide to vaporize trash, they could theoretically
generate electricity equivalent to about 25 nuclear power
plants.
Americans generated 236 million tons of garbage in 2003, about
4.5 pounds per person, per day, according to the latest
figures from the Environmental Protection Agency. Roughly 130
million tons went to landfills - enough to cover a football
field 703 miles high with garbage.
Circeo said criticism of the technology is based on a lack of
understanding.
"We are going to put emissions out, but the emissions are much
lower than virtually any other process, especially a
combustion process in an incinerator," he said.
Circeo said that both plants operating in Japan, where
emissions standards are more stringent than in the U.S., are
producing far less pollution than regulations require.
"For the amount of energy produced, you get significantly less
of certain pollutants like sulfur dioxide and particulate
matter," said Rick Brandes, chief of the Environmental
Protection Agency's waste minimization division.
Geoplasma expects to recoup its $425 million investment,
funded by bonds, within 20 years through the sale of
electricity and slag.
"That's the silver lining," said Hillestad, adding that St.
Lucie County won't pay a dime. The company has assumed full
responsibility for interest on the bonds.
County Commissioner Chris Craft said the plasma process "is
bigger than just the disposal of waste for St. Lucie County."
"It addresses two of the world's largest problems - how to
deal with solid waste and the energy needs of our
communities," Craft said. "This is the end of the rainbow. It
will change the world."
---
On The
Net:
Geoplasma:
http://www.geoplasma.com
By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
