In November campaign group UKWIN (The United Kingdom Without Incineration) published a seven-page briefing report - ‘Gasification Failures in the UK: Bankruptcies and Abandonment’.
UKWIN said gasification and pyrolysis “constitute some of the riskiest and more unreliable technologies in the waste industry and are associated with scores of bankruptcies, failures and broken promises”.
If that wasn’t enough salt to be rubbed into the Air Products’s Teesside wound, Shlomo Dowen, national coordinator of UKWIN, added: “Promoters of gasification and pyrolysis schemes often cite existing and past projects to bolster support for their new proposals, but don’t like to mention that those other projects were actually embarrassing failures.”
Furthermore, in May, construction company Interserve said it would be setting aside £70 million for the “deterioration”, caused by technical issues, of its contract to build Viridor’s gasification plant in Glasgow.
In a statement Interserve said: “The issues relate to the design, procurement and installation of the gasification plant, together with continuing challenges with the supply chain that will result in further cost overruns and delays.”
Despite the high profile gasification ‘casualty’, delays and vocal protests from campaign groups, the industry remains committed to the technology and views the problems as learning experiences.
“The failure of some projects to date are not endemic to the sector but representative of the boundaries being pushed and the wide range of lessons being learned,” said Mark Sommerfeld, policy analyst at the Renewable Energy Association (REA), responding to the UKWIN report. “As a result, the gasification industry is characterised by innovation – delivering a declining cost base, expanding product ranges and improved performances.”
Lockheed Martin to Touch Down in Wales
One of those innovations will be taking place in Wales. In October Lockheed Martin signed a teaming agreement with CoGen to develop a 150,000 tonne per year waste to energy plant in Cardiff. Construction is expected to being in 2018, with operations starting in 2020. The facility will use Concord Blue’s Reformer advanced gasification technology to generate 15 MW of energy.
“This is the kind of gasification project that needs to be supported - it’s an interesting technology,” says Geraint Evans, programme manager at the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI). “The ETI continues to look to support advanced waste gasification seeing it as an important opportunity, in particular if combined with CCS (carbon capture and storage).”
Elsewhere, the UK’s Recycling Technologies is scaling up its process to turn plastics to “low sulphur hydrocarbon compound”, known as Plaxx, which can be used as a substitute for fossil based heavy fuel oil.
Recently the Swindon based company was named in the 2016 Global Cleantech 100 Ones to Watch list, as well as being shortlisted for an innovation award in the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management Sustainability Awards.
“Gasification continues to be a technology approach with problems in the UK market, but with each failure the sector learns more and more about the critical factors for successful delivery, in particular concerning the technology’s ability to cope with UK residual waste stream variability etc.,” says Dr Adam Read, practice director – resource efficiency & waste management, Ricardo Energy & Environment.
Coincidentally, in the same city of Swindon, Advanced Plasma Power (APP) and its subsidiary Go Green Fuels are developing a waste to biomethane facility, part funded by the Department for Transport (DfT) and their Advanced Biofuels Demonstration Competition.
The plant will gasify a mixture of refuse derived fuel (RDF) and wood waste, using a plasma convertor to reduce contaminants in the syngas. A methanation unit is then used to convert the syngas to biomethane for transport uses. It may also be used for producing gas for injection into the grid.
“This process aims to do what many anaerobic digestion plants currently do, but is not restricted to organic waste and therefore (potentially) has much, much wider applicability,” says Mark Ramsay, principal consultant – resource efficiency & waste management, Ricardo Energy & Environment – a consultancy supporting the DfT on the project, which has site start scheduled for the end of November.
Interestingly, in November this year the government release details of a £290 million subsidy for renewable energy projects through the second round of its Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme. This essentially acts as an incentive to low carbon electricity generators for the power they produce.
“Despite the setbacks, this does confirm that the UK Government is still committed to Advanced Conversion Technology, where a strike price of £125 / MWh has been set,” adds Ramsay. “Yes, perhaps for gasification we can still say that there is no such thing as failure only learning experiences.”
The American Dream
Across the pond, developments into US gasification technology continue apace.
Nickolas J. Themelis, director of the Earth Engineering Center, Columbia University, US says: “The WtE innovations I see are in the moving grate technology, such as the CLEERGAS technology of Covanta Energy and the lower capital cost plants built in recent years by China Everbright International. Another promising technology is the Circulating Fluid Bed technology of Zhejiang University which has the potential of application to coal fired plants converted to WtE power plants. I see gasification and pyrolysis more suitable for non-recycled plastics (NRP), which have a calorific value three times that of MSW and at the present time are mostly landfilled.”
While Covanta, as a major waste to energy firm has relied on thermal combustion technologies, it has been working on an alternative, known as CLEERGAS, or Covanta Low Emission Energy Recovery Gasification system.
While a 350 tonne per day commercial unit has been demonstrated in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the company has been relatively quiet on the development of the system. A follow up 300 tonne per day modular CLEERGAS system was expected to be developed and then co-located at one of the company’s WtE facilities in China, although no news has since materialised on this.
During an investor call held earlier this year, CEO Stephen Jones was quoted as saying that the Tulsa unit is “running well”. The company was unavailable to comment.
In a financial statement another US firm, Synthesis Energy Systems, said it has doubled its installed based of gasification systems in China, including providing technology to three industrial fuel plants for the Aluminium Corporation of China.
Meanwhile in October MagneGas signed a $2.65 million contract to supply a 300 kW gasification system to Germany, which will be used to process waste into the company’s MagneGas fuel.
The Future
While the Air Products’s Teesside incident will no doubt leave a black mark in the history of gasification development, other smaller scale projects are being developed to show that innovation can still take place and there is a space for gasification technologies in the broader waste to energy landscape.
As the ETI’s Evans adds: “Just like a successful business that overcomes failures, gasification will become stronger and rise like a phoenix.”
Matt Clay is a freelance correspondent for WMW magazine.
