James G. Speight - Synthesis Gas

One of the major challenges to the gasification process of landfill waste is that such waste has high moisture content and is heterogeneous in nature. Particle size and the presence of a number of components in the waste, such as sulphur, chlorides or metal vary considerably. The interconnected properties of heating value and moisture content play an important role. Hence, pre-preparation must be carefully considered in any waste gasification process. There are a number of different approaches to pre-preparation. Most of these involve mechanical shredding and metals removal using magnetic and electric devices.

Analyses of the composition of municipal solid waste indicate that plastics do make up measurable amounts (5 to 10% w/w or more) of solid waste streams. Many of these plastics are worth recovering as energy. In fact, many plastics, particularly the poly-olefin derivatives, have high calorific values and simple chemical constitutions of primarily carbon and hydrogen. As a result, waste plastics are ideal candidates for the gasification process. Because of the myriad of sizes and shapes of plastic products size reduction is necessary to create a feed material of a size less than 2 inches in diameter. Some forms of waste plastics such as thin films may require a simple agglomeration step to produce a particle of higher bulk density to facilitate ease of feeding. A plastic, such as high-density polyethylene, processed through a gasifier is converted to carbon monoxide and hydrogen and these materials in turn may be used to form other chemicals including ethylene from which the polyethylene is produced – closed the loop recycling .

Recovering energy from municipal solid waste in waste-to-energy (WTE) plants reduces the space required for land filling and offsets the use of fossil fuels for electrical production. When compared to combustion for processing of municipal solid waste, gasification decreases air/water emissions. Within this context, gasification uses oxygen and water vapor to produce a combustible synthesis gas from organic compounds in the municipal solid waste, which can be used to generate electricity, produce chemicals, liquid fuels, hydrogen (H 2), etc. The synthesis gas produced from municipal solid waste by a gasifier is cleaned up more economically and using simpler systems compared to combustion exhaust gases due to the synthesis gas being more condensed. The conversion of energy in gasification is also much more efficient than the thermal conversion offered by combustion. Challenges to the commercialization of the gasification of municipal solid waste include the processing costs of converting municipal solid waste to refuse-derived fuel (RDF) and the formation of tars in the high temperature and pressure environment of the gasifier. Tars can make downstream processing of the synthesis gas more difficult and may result in excessive process train downtime.

The heat content of the refuse-derived fuel depends on the amount of moisture and combustible organic material. Refuse-derived fuel typically has less variability than municipal solid waste which can vary greatly when looking at a small sample. This is important for gasification due to the need to optimize gasifier conditions for specific fuel compositions. To reduce the residence time in the gasifier, the refuse-derived fuel is shredded to a smaller size – the shredding process also serves the purpose of uniformly distributing the various materials, giving the refuse derived a more stable composition, in addition to decreasing the moisture content of the refuse-derived fuel.

The traditional waste-to-energy plant, based on mass-burn combustion on an inclined grate, has a low public acceptability despite the very low emissions achieved over the last decade with modern flue gas clean-up equipment. This has led to difficulty in obtaining planning permissions to construct needed new waste-to-energy plants. After much debate, various governments have allowed options for advanced waste conversion technologies (gasification, pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion), but will only give credit to the proportion of electricity generated from non-fossil waste.

Co-utilization of waste and biomass with coal may provide economies of scale that help achieve the above identified policy objectives at an affordable cost. In some countries, governments propose co-gasification processes as being well suited for community-sized developments suggesting that waste should be dealt with in smaller plants serving towns and cities, rather than moved to large, central plants (satisfying the so-called proximity principle ).

In fact, neither biomass nor wastes are currently produced, or naturally gathered at sites in sufficient quantities to fuel a modern large and efficient power plant. Disruption, transport issues, fuel use, and public opinion all act against gathering hundreds of megawatts (MWe) at a single location. Biomass or waste-fired power plants are therefore inherently limited in size and hence in efficiency (labor costs per unit electricity produced) and in other economies of scale. The production rates of municipal refuse follow reasonably predictable patterns over time periods of a few years. Recent experience with the very limited current biomass for energy harvesting has shown unpredictable variations in harvesting capability with long periods of zero production over large areas during wet weather. The situation is very different for coal, which is generally mined or imported and thus large quantities are available from a single source or a number of closely located sources, and supply has been reliable and predictable. However, the economics of new coal-fired power plants of any technology or size have not encouraged any new coal-fired power plant in the gas generation market.

The potential unreliability of biomass, longer-term changes in refuse and the size limitation of a power plant using only waste and/or biomass can be overcome combining biomass, solid waste (refuse), and coal. The use of combined feedstocks also allows benefit from a premium electricity price for electricity from biomass and the gate fee associated with waste. If the power plant is gasification-based, rather than direct combustion, further benefits may be available. These include a premium price for the electricity from waste, the range of technologies available for the gas to electricity part of the process, gas cleaning prior to the main combustion stage instead of after combustion and public image, which is currently generally better for gasification as compared to combustion. These considerations lead to current studies of co-gasification of biomass and/or solid waste as combined feedstocks with coal (Speight, 2008, 2013; Luque and Speight, 2015).

For large-scale power generation (>50 MWe), the gasification field is dominated by plant based on the pressurized, oxygen-blown, entrained flow or fixed-bed gasification of fossil fuels. Entrained gasifier operational experience to date has largely been with well-controlled fuel feedstocks with short-term trial work at low co-gasification ratios and with easily handled fuels.

Use of waste materials as co-gasification feedstocks may attract significant disposal credits. Cleaner biomass materials are renewable fuels and may attract premium prices for the electricity generated. Availability of sufficient fuel locally for an economic plant size is often a major issue, as is the reliability of the fuel supply. Use of more-predictably available coal alongside these fuels overcomes some of these difficulties and risks. Coal could be regarded as the stand-in which keeps the plant running when the fuels producing the better revenue streams are not available in sufficient quantities.

Coal characteristics are very different to the alternate sources of hydrocarbon fuels such as biomass and waste. Hydrogen-to-carbon ratios are higher for younger fuels, as is the oxygen content. This means that reactivity is very different under gasification conditions. Gas cleaning issues can also be very different, with sulfur always a major concern for coal gasification and chlorine compounds and tars more important for waste and biomass gasification. There are no current proposals for adjacent gasifiers and gas cleaning systems, one handling biomass or waste and one coal, alongside each other and feeding the same power production equipment. However, there are some advantages to such a design as compared with mixing fuels in the same gasifier and for the gas cleaning systems.