By Brian Skoloff
Associated Press
FORT PIERCE, Fla. – A Florida county has grand plans to ditch its dump, generate electricity and help build roads – all by vaporizing garbage at temperatures hotter than the sun.
The $425 million plant 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, although 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 electricity – about 120 megawatts a day – 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. plant to power the juice producer’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 plants have been converting methane – created by rotting trash in landfills – to power. Others also burn trash to produce electricity.
The plasma-arc gasification plant in St. Lucie County, on central Florida’s Atlantic Coast, aims to eliminate the need for a landfill. Only two similar plants 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.
“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, Geoplasma says.
But a critic disagrees.
“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 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 plants run by different companies in Australia and Germany that closed after failing to meet emission 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.”
Geoplasma expects to recoup its $425 million investment, financed by bonds, within 20 years through the sale of electricity and slag.
“That’s the silver lining,” said the company’s Hillestad, adding that St. Lucie County won’t pay a dime. The company has assumed full responsibility for interest on the bonds.
“It addresses two of the world’s largest problems – how to deal with solid waste and the energy needs of our communities,” County Commissioner Cris Craft said. “This is the end of the rainbow. It will change the world.”
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2 comments:
Has it occured to anyone that this will be the largest plant of it's kind in the world ?
While there are two other plants built of this nature in Japan, both are much smaller than the proposed St. Lucie plant.
Does no one else see the risk in "building the world's largest" of anything ???????
Its beyond the risk. Its that this company has never built anything in this field ever. It all seems fishy between the development company and geoplasma being awarded the bid based on being the only one who responded to the rfp. Residents should be suspicious of this company which has not built anything and only existed on paper before the deal came out
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