Friday, March 29, 2024

Red-hot garbage debate

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LIKE MOST attending Cahill’s open house public meeting last Wednesday night, I was surprised at the simplistic level of the Cahill panel’s presentation which conveyed little information, not to mention the panel’s apparent inability to answer some of the questions posed by the well-informed audience.

At face value, this plasma gasification project for which foreign investors will put up the staggering capital costs and which will address both our garbage and energy woes, sounds too good to be true, and therein lies the problem. Can the international environmental engineering consultants who the Barbados Government employed to provide the technical advice on the various bids for the waste to energy (WTE) project, really have recommended the Cahill option?

A major concern to all is that plasma gasification of municipal waste is an emerging rather than a proven technology. Cahill at the meeting listed several operational plasma gasification plants but either they use a different definition of plasma gasification, or these are specialised plants developed for treating hazardous waste for which this technology has been used.

One in US

Westinghouse Plasma Corporation, whose technology Cahill is supposed to be using, lists one plant in the United Kingdom which is not yet commissioned, a handful in Asia and for the United States, only a demonstration plant in Pennsylvania (www.westinghouse-plasma.com/projects/).

If this approach is really the WTE solution, why aren’t there several of these plants across the US? This is an extremely high-tech facility. Is this really appropriate for a small island where, as one online commentator has already pointed out, even garbage collection poses challenges?

The proposed plant must be fed carbon-based material to vaporise this to a hydrocarbon-based fuel gas. We were told this plant would not put recyclers out of business; instead, the plant would buy the appropriate waste from local recyclers. As convenient as it may be to “atomise” plastics and compostable material to basic building blocks, this is not an environmentally sound policy. Using recyclables as fuel means more energy and raw materials will have to be used to replace these. Furthermore, elsewhere the market already recognises that certain papers and plastics can fetch a higher price as recyclables than fuels. Lastly, material that could enrich the organic content of our soils would now be used as fuel instead.

The Cahill panel also spoke about some miracle crop called king grass that would be grown in Barbados to feed the facility. What is king grass? We are yet to learn from Cahill but it seems to be a sterile Pennisetum hybrid produced by crossing pearl millet and elephant grass. In the world of biofuels, one thing is agreed.

Using biomass for energy is only economically viable if you are getting the feedstock free or at rock bottom prices. If you get the feedstock at a low cost as garbage or as a “waste” product like bagasse or even tree trimmings, this may be economic, but not if you are going to pay to cultivate it with all the agricultural inputs. One only has to look at the balance sheet for sugar cane production and that is reputedly the world’s most efficient plant for converting light energy into biomass.

There is a safe, proven technology for converting biomass into a fuel gas and furthermore generating a nutrient-rich residue that can be sold to farmers. This biogas approach is based on the anaerobic conversion in sealed chambers or digesters of plant and animal wastes by bacteria into a hydrocarbon-rich biogas and a biofertiliser residue. Germany is the world leader in this tried and tested technology, with the biogas used to generate electricity or used as a replacement fuel for natural gas. Would this not be a more appropriate solution for us?

We know little about the negative by-products of plasma gasification. At the Cahill meeting we were informed that a solid, inert slag is generated by the process which can be six to 15 per cent of the volume of the original waste fed into the plant, the percentage varying with the feedstock. This apparently will be shipped off island. Won’t that be expensive? This is one of those details that suggests we may regret for the next 30 years accepting this $700 million “gift”.

Water supply

Will this proposed facility affect our water supply? How much water will this plant consume? Online sources suggest water is used for cooling and scrubbing (cleaning) the resulting fuel gas. At the meeting, Cahill assured us that any water used will be properly treated before being discharged to the aquifer. Can a water-scarce country like Barbados afford to use its valuable water for this purpose? Are there toxic residues produced that must be disposed of at further cost?

There is enough uncertainty about this “solution” that I would wish us to stay far away and the Cahill team did not reassure us with their knowledge. A 2013 White Paper by the International Solid Waste Association entitled Alternative Waste Conversion Technologies states: “. . . the information about operational performance of existing plasma gasification installations is almost non-existent. There are no papers that report on energy efficiency of commercially operating installations and certainly not on internal energy use; there is limited information about emissions in operational installations . . . . No public information is available on costs and long term performance.”

Cahill was clear in emphasising their role as developers of the project and presumably will sell this on to others. They then are not in it for the long term, while we who live here are.

We can only hope that the international investors required to make this project happen are as equally unimpressed with Cahill as the Barbadian audience were last Wednesday night, so that this project remains unfunded and nothing more than pie in the sky.

– Sean Carrington

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