Waste-Tire To Energy

If you wanted to invest a few seconds, you could probably count the tires in the pic on the left.  I don’t think you’d be so successful with the aerial shot below, however.  When I came across this latter photograph just now, I decided to write a short post on the subject of waste-to-energy, in particular, waste-tire to either energy or fuels.  The U.S. alone landfills approximately 300 million old tires each year, thus providing enormous habitat for the breeding of mosquitoes, while simultaneously wasting huge amounts of chemical energy that can be converted to useful work–in the form of some combination of electricity, liquid hydrocarbon fuels, or heat for industrial purposes.  

In truth, this is not a straightforward problem to solve, for many different reasons, including a tough permitting climate and technology (pyrolysis/gasification, a combination of catalysts, as well as elevated temperature and pressure) that very seldom works as well as it’s claimed to, at least without significant amounts of expertise, not to mention maintenance. A third problem is implied in the pic itself: feedstock.  Yes, 300 million is a big number, but these tires are in pockets all over the 3.5 million square mile landmass that forms the continental U.S.

As a client of mine in this space once told me, “He who controls the tires will ultimately win the game.”  I’m sure he’s correct.  In the meanwhile, this is a problem begging for a solution.