Jack McMullen To Play Key Role in Waste-To-Energy Project
During my trip back East last week I had the honor of meeting Jack McMullen in his office in Cambridge, MA. If you want to see an interesting and multi-varied bio, you may want to check this out.
I’m happy to report that Jack, a man of great accomplishment and integrity, will be playing a leading role in one of the huge waste-to-energy projects that I’m so excited about — a project in which 3000 tons of municipal solid waste a day will be converted to 130 megawatts of electricity; this is summarized in the video below.
Please drop me a line if you know of anyone who may also like to play an investment role in cleantech here.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uSdDP_0WmQ]
Our Thermal Conversion System can produce 210MW of renewable energy per 3,000 t/d of MSW. I can send details if you needed one.
I would appreciate receiving any details which you might be able to share. thank you for considering my request.
kind regards.
Craig,
Agreed that this is a huge issue but not much of description of the system. I saw a flame in the presentation but little else to describe how the system works. Cleveland now debating whats may be a similar system. Anywhere I can get additional information – not for investor but purely my own curiosity.
Bob Dyer
This sounds an awful lot like Plasma gasification. I have been interested in that procedure for a long time. Is that what this is all about?
Smaller examples are being implemented in India. I do not agree that big is better. I think it is part of the reason our population in the U.S. does not work to potential. I prefer islandable micro-grids, a notion I first heard of from Amory Lovins. With operations and maintenance close to use, more ordinary people can be employed and empowered, including girls and women.
Hi,
I am curious as to what technology is going to be utilized to solve this problem. I think there is a simple solution but am very interested in what is currently proposed. Also, what is the minimum investment that you are interested in entertaining?
Kevin Moen
I might question this ambitious project. First of all everyone thinks building bigger is better. In order to process 3,000 tons per day it means that you are probably brining in 4,000 tons a day from the street. What are the logistics of this? One large plant means that lots of miles have to be traveled to bring that to one point. The development of smaller more localized plants makes more sense in many ways. And the multiple plant strategy is like the Internet whereby should one plant go down or have a reduced capacity the other plants can pick up the difference.
For a plant of this scale virtually every part of it will be custom made so in the event of a component failure the system will be down until that part is fabricated, not likely it will be on the shelf.
And lets look at the cost, about $3 million per MW. Smaller plants can be built on a more cost effective basis. I have developed more cost effective solutions by going with smaller facilities. And this plant is saying that it can produce slightly more than one MW per ton of MSW. The best plants in the world are running only at approximately 600kW per ton. I often wonder about the designers and their projections about what amount of power they can extract from a ton of waste.
I’ll give the designers or promoters the benefit of the doubt and give them an out for the claim of 130MW, which is if they combine electrical, MWe, and possible thermal MWt energy flows. Possibly combined the total Btu would be 130MW, but lets hope that there is actually a thermal load the plant can connect to, and for a plant of this size it might not be near such a load as nobody wants a WTE plant in their backyard.
If the technology behind this is plasma, which is often the case with conversion claims like this I more seriously doubt the ability for this plant to generate such outputs. Plasma is overkill for all but the most difficult waste streams such as hazardous organic and inorganic wastes. Plasma on MSW is like driving a finish nail with a 10 pound sledge hammer.
Everyone wants to think bigger is better and has grand statements of what can be done. In the end the costs grow larger than planned, the environmental and logistical costs are greater than projected and while it might work the financial returns promised never quite work out so the cost to deliver wastes to the plant are significantly increased to cover the losses.
If someone wants me to look at what they are doing and to get a better position on how to accomplish managing 3,000 tons per day they need to get in contact with me.
A company named Greenlight Energy Solutions is doing something simular in Russia, they are a U.S. company but the permitting was slow here and Russia welcomed them right in, they are milking the SIN gas off with crackers then useing the gas to run a turbine to create energy, the remaining material is carbon, which is sold to create carbon fiber products, all with no pollution, it sounds like a great idea.
I would like to see a more detailed description of the technology involved and also the IRR and NPV numbers for this project.