Residential syngas generators and APUs

[FishTankX]

So, it seems that america generates alot of trash. Most of it is probably incineratable.

Would it not make sense for houses to have syngas generators powered by their household waste, to both heat the house in winter or generate hot water, and store fuel for syngas powered turbine generators? This seems like a great way to both reduce the amount of trash required to pickup (reduce the fuel requirements of the trash collecting fleet) and generate free power/heat for the house, possibly even making the power for your plugin hybrid free!

 

[wwswimming]

about 6 months ago i got a tour of a 7 MWatt facility.

the top covered about 22 acres, and was covered with crushed concrete.

the depth of the landfill was about 100 yards.

i made a joke about "lighting a cigarette". the tour director got a little excited and
said, "no, do not light a cigarette". so, there's a little seepage through all the liners
etc. they put on top of the landfill.

the gas output is run to conventional electrical generators that burn it and generate
7 megawatts.

to scale it to an individual household or city block - interesting idea. i'm not sure
how well it would scale 'downward'.

 

[CycloWizard]

There are a few problems with scaling this back to an individual household. First and foremost, the cost would be prohibitive. Second, the air pollution controls that are used at large-scale facilities wouldn't be feasible, which would mean that this sort of implementation would either be illegal or be a huge new source of air pollution.

 

[FishTankX]

Would it, instead, be scalable down to a neighborhood?

Also, this would be a syngas generator, not a natural gas unit. All of the trash would be burned every day before it got the chance to decay.

Syngas generators, instead of relying on natural gas to be generated by bacteria, just heats it up enough to disassociate the hydrocarbons. No bacteria needed, they wouldn't survive the intense heat anyways. And they're much faster at decomposing down the garbage than methane harvesters.

Even if you only had one of these for each section of town, I feel like it would be a boon to the economy, and if you implemented hydrogen storage on site instead of burning it for power, you could just give people hydrogen credits for the eventuality of hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles..

The way I envision this working is.. if this is run by the facilities, by the city block, people would just dump in garbage (after having it weighed) and get an electricity bill credit after inserting an ID card.

Then run district heat to the various places..

This doesn't have to be terribly profitable, as the massive fuel savings from garbage trucks would offset any costs incurred by this system.

Not to mention, methane is a highly potent green house gas, (32x as strong as CO2) so the offset of methane release could be considered for global warming credits.

 

[BrownTown]

The problem is one of air pollution, the amount of toxic chemicals and heavy metals which would be released by burning trash are FAR more than are legally allowed. The cost of removing all these chemicals would likely be more than the cost of plant itself. Also it could never be scaled down to a household or even neighborhood scale economically.

There are certainly alot of places that do use "waste" as fuel. For example in the region I live there are two landfill gas plants which use methane to produce power. The also co-fire wood waste (like sawdust from cutting boards) in a coal plant around here, and recently sign a contract to burn paint leftovers front an automobile plant in another coal plant. Usually you can burn something like 5% "waste" in a coal plant along with 95% coal and not negatively impact the performance of the plant or emissions controls.

 

[KIAman]

We are on the verge of alternative power solutions. Some solutions out there are downright crazy.

How about electricity from your own urine? http://www.news-medical.net/?id=12482

Although piezoelectric effects have been known for a long time, nobody ever made a serious attempt at production until recently. There are now hundreds of applications for vibration based electricity all coming to production.

When it comes to burning trash, the issue is simply air based pollution. That's why most waste-to-electricity solutions involve slow chemical conversion process or rely on bacteria to reduce air based emissions.

As to ground and water based pollution... nobody gives a crap. Literally.