Sludge Watch ==> California - cheap diesal from sludge - pilot plant

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

9/15/2006 12:00 AM
http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_4340026

>From sludge to cheap and clean diesel

Andrew Silva, Staff Writer
San Bernardino County Sun

RIVERSIDE - Diesel for $1 a gallon.
And not from oil. Instead, it would come from sewer sludge, wood, 
agricultural waste, plain old trash or even plastics.

That's the promise of a new process unveiled Thursday at UC Riverside by 
researchers and a small company that will pay $15 million for a pilot plant 
to be built in the next two years.

"One of the advantages of this is we will reduce the need for imported oil," 
said Joseph Norbeck, a professor of engineering at UC Riverside's Bourns 
College of Engineering-Center for Environmental Research and Technology, 
also known as CE-CERT.

Researchers have come up with a new way of taking just about any product 
with carbon in it, from coal to PVC pipe to nylon, and converting it into a 
gas and then turning that gas into high-quality diesel.

The production cost is about $1 a gallon, though retail would be higher - 
but still far cheaper than current prices.

The process of turning solids into gas has been around for centuries. Gas 
lights in 18th century London were powered by gas derived from coal.

South Africa got most of its fuel from gasification projects when other 
nations wouldn't sell it oil during the apartheid era.

But those processes are messy and require a lot of energy.

Many of the old gasification plants are now Superfund sites, said Neal 
Richter, a scientist who spent decades with Texaco and is now a technical 
adviser for Viresco Energy, the Riverside-based company that will bankroll 
the plant.

Two-thirds of the process uses tried-and-true, off-the-shelf technology. The 
new trick is how they turn solids into a gas, and how efficient that new 
technique is.

A process that normally takes an hour can be done in six minutes, or 
10-times faster, said Norbeck.

"We don't know why it happens," he said. "We can convert this faster than 
anyone has ever seen."

And there's little waste. Up to 85 percent of the feed material becomes 
useable liquid fuel at the other end.

Norbeck and the other researchers have a great deal of confidence in the 
process. They admit to being a little gun shy about bragging after an 
earlier failure more than a decade ago with methanal.

"I think we have a winner here," he said.

Young grad students showed off the small-scale processor inside one of 
CE-CERT's research buildings.

Though it is not widely known, CE-CERT is one of the nation's preeminent 
research facilities that investigate alternative fuels, high-tech vehicle 
improvements and air quality.

In a cramped room, development technician Junior Castillo points to a 
17-foot tall cylinder where the magic takes place.

Whereas traditional gasification uses oxygen, the new technique uses 
hydrogen and steam at nearly 1,500 degrees to break apart the feed stock 
into a gas made up of its molecular components.

The gas then goes through a couple of other steps.

"It comes out with water, wax and diesel," Castillo said.

The fuel has all the energy content of regular diesel without the sulfur, 
oxides of nitrogen and other components that led California to declare 
diesel fumes a cancer-causing substance.

The pilot plant will be built at the CE-CERT campus on Columbia Avenue and 
should be able to convert 10 tons of waste per day into fuel. Construction 
is expected to be complete by mid-2008.

Viresco Energy is already talking with the city of Riverside about building 
a 400 ton-per-day plant near the city's sewage-treatment facility, where 
sewer sludge can be turned to fuel, said Jim Guthrie, president of Viresco.

If it works, plants could be established all over the country to help cities 
deal with sewer sludge and municipal waste, all while creating high-quality, 
inexpensive fuel, he said.