Click here to go back to News listing.
Incinerating rubbish to produce energy is no breaking news but it could be a viable solution to reduce the amount of waste sent to our landfills every day. That is what Canadian-based company Enerkem is hoping to achieve, whose technology turns old utility poles and household garbage into ethanol.
Every day millions of tons of rubbish are dumped into landfills across the globe to slowly decompose, from this decomposing process methane, a greenhouse gas, is released into the atmosphere.
Finding a solution to this problem has been subject of discussion by world leader for many years and various solutions have been proposed but they have never really added up to a wining proposition.
Enerkem is only a start-up but the announcement of a $60 million investment into the company by two big Canadian corporations has surely turned some heads. The company isn’t exactly established yet, but it is finishing up a “refinery” near Sherbrooke, Quebec, with a claimed capacity of producing 1.3 million gallons of ethanol annually.
Others have tried to produce ethanol from rubbish, like the E-Fuel Microfueler Refinery, a portable ethanol refinery from a Californian based company. But as afore mentioned the chemical arithmetic has never really added up to a winning proposition.
Enerkem’s differential is that since Enerkem is a waste management company it gets paid to dispose of the garbage it burns, making its raw materials “cost negative.”
How Rubbish is converted into Ethanol
First of all the organic waste must be separated from the recyclables, and then this organic waste is shredded and heated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. From this process Hydrogen and carbon monoxide are produced and are trapped as they escape the incinerating rubbish and impurities like carbon dioxide are filtered out. These purified gases are then run over a catalyst which converts them into methanol. Methanol itself can be used as a fuel, but it releases too much CO2 from its burn, so a further refining step turns the methanol to ethanol.
If Enerkem manages to make this process work cost-effectively, it could sure be a game changer for the waste management industry as well as the energy industry.
SHARE THIS:
| Tweet |