Waste-to-fuel reactor wins 2010 industry award
Published Wednesday, 12th May 2010
A new type of reactor that converts waste materials into liquid fuels has won the 2010 award from CWC World XTL, a conference for the gas, coal and biomass to liquids industry.
The microchannel reactor developed by Velocys, an Ohio-based subsidiary of the UK’s Oxford Catalysts, is designed to provide a small-scale but high-intensity way to produce liquid fuels from waste that’s close to the waste source. In that way, waste can be converted to productive use without having to transport it long distances, which could erase the environmental benefits of the process.
The Velocys reactor can achieve productivity levels that are orders of magnitude higher than those of conventional Fischer-Tropsch reactors. (The Fischer-Tropsch process uses chemical reactions to convert hydrogen and carbon monoxide into liquid hydrocarbons.) The reactor can also operate economically at outputs as low as 500 barrels of liquid fuel per day.
A demonstration plant that will use the Velocys reactor to convert gasified woodchips into fuel is currently being commissioned in Güssing, Austria.
“Our innovation represents a whole new way of looking at the problems associated with the distributed production of new-generation biofuels, and the fuels produced offer significant environmental benefits over equivalent products from fossil fuels,” said Roy Lipski, CEO of the Oxford Catalysts Group.
RELATED NEWS
Latest Insight
What is the smart grid?
Governments, energy companies and tech firms all talk about the “smart grid” a
Clean-energy incentives: Here … then gone
Call it penny-wise, pound-foolish (or Euro-foolish) … although “cutting off your nose to
This gadget’s raison d’etre is a social testimony and confession that we are indeed short of good cheap liquid fuels, and will soon follow the Former Soviet Union’s ways and live in great communal Nuclear powered apartment blocks without motor-cars and with possibly corn fed aquaponics as a major food source. The current foreign liquid energy system is not surviving, cannot grow, will diminish as the finite amount of oil in the world is used up , and end in a crescendo of oil prices and a desperate run on Nuclear development, possibly followed by a breath-taking government forced socialist Manhattan Project style development of Solar, Wind , Wave, Hydro, Tidal, and Geo-thermal resources for electrical energy. There are no other sources of energy folks – thats it! Thats all! We have little choice in the matter, save for some mysterious new source coming along, and the odds for that happening are, well, not favorable at all! Yes, the peasants of America’s new age will mine the dumps and the chemical dumps of this age for resources, and yes, we will come up short! China has purchased and stock-piled many vital resources and promise a new golden age for themselves – not us! We are to be devoured in support of a greater Asian Empire, as is Africa and the Oceans of the world. China has, up and running, the greatest recycling projects on the planet. They buy our garbage and scrap products and through manpower alone, recoup all value from them. They use cheaper Nuclear and Coal power to reform them. China sells them to us for our petroleum based dollars and win big with this EROI lever against the mighty, oil based, American consumer. This device will help stem the flow of riches away from America, but we must do much more if we are to compete with the Asians, and so far they are ahead of us, far ahead of us and winning this crucial race! Will Vulture Capitalism and Barracuda Corporatism win out in the end? Only time can tell, but for now America with its corruption is losing this vital battle.
We have it working for a long time!!
We at Green Power Inc for now over 2 Years built and operate a Full Scale System converting all forms of Waste which have Hydro Carbons in it, so nearly everything you throw away with the exception of Metal, Glass and stones into High Quality Fossil Free Fuels. The Fuel can be straight filed into cars and engines, Airplanes etc. no modifications needed. Now you will ask why is this not all over, because of one Beaurocrat in Spokane Washington Ecology Office as he stops us all the way. Other Countries are contracting with us, but in US we are still not allowed to operate full time. We had to lay people off and are asked to move manufacturing overseas, we don’t want to but the local Government actions may force us to do so, so we would lose here in US cheap local Fuel out of waste and the Jobs as well. It feels very bad as we did not take any Government funding to build our system. Our system is ready at full scale and can be implemented anywhere in the world it can give countries fuel and energy independence out of local resources at a much lower price than regular fuel on the Market.
• We have the solution we believe check us out at http://www.facebook.com/greenpowerinc or on our website http://www.cleanenergyprojects.com.
We did it without Government help and we have it working to prove our claim, on full scale not just lab scale ideas. Why spend Billions of Government funding to develop something when we already have it.
Your Green Power Inc Team
And Garbage we have all over the world enough to do it!
It remains to be seen if the process is economically viable and ecologically friendly.
Benjamin Koshkin
@Green Power Inc –
The problem with converting rubbish dumps into fuel, is that rubbish that burns came from forest or oil, or organic matter to be certain. So by burning all our rubbish, we’ll be releasing ever more CO2 into the atmosphere.
You may have achieved something that is technically brilliant and requires great skill to accomplish. But in reality, your solution does not target global warming, unless you can capture the CO2 from the exhaust of the device burning your fuel.
It would be nice to get rid of those rubbish dumps, admittedly. But are there better ways than releasing it into the atmosphere…? I should think so.