At the Waste Conversion Congress West Coast, both government officials and technology providers said they see major progress in energy-from-waste efforts.
It can be difficult to forge consensus in the realm of solid waste and recycling policy, where two or more constituencies can have widely divergent points of view on how to best handle discarded materials.
Industry conferences, such as the Waste Conversion Congress West Coast event, held in December 2011 in San Jose, Calif., can offer a setting where these different points of view can be on display.
At the Congress, organized by Eye for Energy (www.eyeforenergy.com), speakers addressed a number of policy considerations and also offered insight on competing waste conversion technologies designed to provide an alternative to landfills for materials that have thus far proven cost-ineffective to recycle.
Commitments to Conversion
Among the geographic regions demonstrating a serious commitment to energy-from-waste production is the host city of San Jose.
Michele Young of that city’s Environmental Services Department has been helping to develop what she described as an “integrated organics strategy” as part of the city’s Zero Waste Strategic Plan, which was adopted in August 2010.
Young said the city currently has a 75 percent landfill diversion requirement in its waste and recycling hauling contracts, and in his State of the City address, the city’s mayor singled out gasification as an approach the city is likely to take in the future. As well, the city has a goal of operating a fleet of cars and trucks by 2022 that consists of 100 percent alternative energy vehicles.
San Jose is working in partnership with Zero Waste Energy Development Co., based in San Jose, to design a landfill diversion program that will include materials recycling, composting and energy production involving an anaerobic digestion process.
Zero Waste Energy Development is part of a family of companies stemming from the Zanker Materials Recovery and Landfill operation on the edge of San Jose in the Alviso neighborhood.
The City of San Jose and Zero Waste Energy Development have obtained or are in the process of obtaining several permits that will allow them to operate a 270,000 tons per year organics-to-energy plant that will produce 5 megawatts of energy annually, said Emily Hanson, project manager for Zero Waste Energy Development.
That amount of electricity is enough to power from 3,600 to 4,000 homes per year, said Hanson.
She told attendees that the project involves quite a few “firsts,” including being the “first commercial dry fermentation anaerobic digestion facility for municipal solid waste in the United States.” Stated Young, “We’re really in uncharted territory.”
In Los Angeles County, in the heart of America’s second largest metropolitan statistical area, L.A. County Department of Public Works Assistant Deputy Director Pat Proano says waste conversion technologies “will be part of what L.A. County does” from this point forward.
At its landfills, L.A. County is “setting aside 50 cents per ton” of what is collected to go toward researching and then investing in energy-from-waste technologies, said Proano.
There is support in L.A. County for such efforts said Proano, reversing a pattern of decades-long resistance to energy-from-waste efforts, viewed by some as “incineration.” Stated Proano, “Let’s get rid of the myths and have an adult conversation about this.”
Technology Considerations
As solid waste districts examine switching from a landfilling model to an energy-from-waste one, there is no shortage of technology providers stepping forward to offer solutions.
Harvey Gershman of Fairfax, Va.-based consulting firm Gershman, Brickner & Bratton Inc. (GBB) listed biochemical, plasma arc, autoclave and gasification technologies as among those competing for attention, funding and market share.
As they examine such technologies, Gershman said municipal officials and investors have to be cautious and conduct considerable due diligence. “Vendors may not always tell you the whole truth,” he commented. “This is why you’ll want to commission an independent review.”
As well as providing an unbiased opinion, said Gershman, a review by a consulting firm such as GBB benefits “non-technical decision-makers” such as elected officials by drawing upon a deeper well of technical knowledge and experience. “We look at it from the garbage side,” he noted.
One ton of municipal solid waste (MSW) has the equivalent btu (British thermal unit) value of “one barrel of oil, a half-ton of coal or 80 to 90 gallons of ethanol,” said Gershman. When considering the estimated 130 million to 200 million tons of MSW currently landfilled each year, it “has significant energy value and could create a lot of production,” he stated.
Consultant Michelle Nicholls of SCS Engineers, Los Angeles, told attendees that communities considering their energy-from-waste options should ask themselves several questions, including:
- How would this approach fit into the current collection and recycling infrastructure?
- Is the amount of inbound feedstock guaranteed, and is the tipping fee reasonable?
- Who may be affected negatively by this new approach and thus may lobby against it?
- What is the back-up plan to handle MSW when the energy-from-waste plant is down?
Investors, technology providers and project developers have their own set of questions to ask, said Nicholls, including:
- Can the facility be permitted?
- Can the facility work in coordination with current operations?
- Are there safeguards if the energy or product revenue is below expectations?
In the rapidly emerging sector, said Nicholls, all stakeholders have good reasons to be wary. “There are some 500-plus technologies; they’re not all going to work,” she stated.
Follow the Money
For solid waste districts or for-profit companies to engage in a dramatic shift away from landfilling and toward energy-from-waste systems, the level of investment will have to be considerable.
John May of Stern Brothers & Co., St. Louis, was among the speakers with views on how money is flowing in the energy-from-waste sector.
May said most commercial banks “are not lending to this space because they view it as too risky.” Those seeking financing have had greater success in the bond market, he noted. (A more detailed article on May’s view of the bond market can be found in the article “Healthy Support,” starting on page 29 of this issue.)
Taking part in the solid waste sector is nothing new for creators of bond issues, said May, who remarked that some forms of solid waste bonds “have been around since the 1970s.”
Within the bond market, “There is an appetite for high-yield, or riskier, bonds; there is an appetite for that kind of paper,” May commented.
Mark Riedy of the Washington law firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo told attendees the U.S. military has been an advocate for bio-fuels, with the Navy and Air Force seeking to operate on 50 percent bio-fuels by 2020. “That is an enormous amount,” he commented.
Other nations have established considerable investment funds in the bio-fuels sector, said Riedy, including a $24 billion “green investment bank” in the United Kingdom and a $13.2 billion Clean Energy Finance Corp. program in Australia.
In addition to the armed forces, a number of agencies in the United States have bio-fuels support programs available, including the United States Department of Agriculture, said Riedy, who also is general counsel for the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE).
Attorney John Pierce, based in Seattle for DLA Piper, told Congress attendees, “The federal funding is going away” in some cases. He added, “I never thought it was all that good.”
Pierce remarked that there also are funding sources in international markets such as China, the United Arab Emirates or Singapore, “if you have the risk appetite.”
In his view, many of the projects in the United States seeking funding have put “too much focus on technology” and not enough focus on logistics or feedstocks. “Is your feedstock sustainable?” he asked attendees.
Partnering
Joining the Congress via teleconference, attorney Tal Finney of Dongel Lawrence Finney LLP, Los Angeles, offered “A Framework for Public/Private Partnerships” in the energy-from-waste sector.
Finney told attendees that 13 percent of the discarded materials in the U.S. are going into energy production applications while 54 percent heads to landfills, which strikes Finney as a troubling circumstance. “The general public has no idea how environmentally damaging [landfills] can be,” he remarked.
In Finney’s view, most energy-from-waste systems provide a better option than continuing the current practice in the U.S. of land-filling some 3,500 acres per year of waste.
He remarked that such systems can still “promote recycling” and that treating the remaining materials as energy inputs “makes waste a commodity. That’s an exciting thing considering how much waste is generated every day.”
The public-private framework described by Finney has the public agency in the role of obtaining grants and performing legal review work while benefitting by reducing its waste disposal costs and producing energy. The private company involved plays the roles of developing innovative technology and adopting some of the risk while it profits from the sale of licensed technology and equipment and potentially collects the tipping fees.
Finney was optimistic about the progress of such public-private partnerships, telling attendees that “contracts are being signed in several places around the world that previously had not been doing anything” in the energy-from-waste sector. “It’s starting to finally happen, on a very large scale,” Finney stated.
The author is editorial director of Renewable Energy from Waste and can be contacted at [email protected].