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Agronomist Ludson Lafontant looking at one of the recently constructed ledges
during a visit to Doucet in August 2013. It contains a young mango tree plant,
a grass plant, and peanut plants. Photo : HGW/Milo Milfort

Doucet (Petit-Goâve), HAITI, 19 November 2013 – Ludson Lafontant, an agronomist who specializes in reforestation, works in Fond d’Oies in the mountains above Léogâne, 32 kms. south of the capital. After visiting many of the Petit-Goâve hillsides, Lafontant noted that the techniques used offer many advantages.


Joslyn Philogen (center) planted the Moringa tree behind him 16 years ago, not realizing that it would someday bring new hope to his village, Lambert.

However, the agronomist agreed that eucalyptus is not the best choice for reforestation. “All plants use water” he said. “But these kinds of plants – eucalyptus and also neem – I would not put them near rivers or wells or farmers’ fields. They suck up all the water around them.”

Ledges are not built in a manner that takes into account the fact that farmers will plant on or near them, no matter what they have promised.

“You can’t stop a peasant who wants to work his little piece of land,” Lafontant said. “If it were me, I would close off these structures you see here, but I would build little contours with level shelves where they could plant their peanuts.”


In the mountains of Morne l’Hopital above the neighborhood of Martissant. Teams built dry stone retaining walls and planted some 2 million native non-invasive bamboo plants and vetiver, a local grass variety with a modest root system good for anchoring banks. -Dave Hampton

Plasma Biomass Abiomass Gasifier

A base case scenario with a 680 tonne per day (750 US tons) waste gasification plant which would be appropriate for a small city or regional facility, would cost an estimated $150 million (€108 million) to construct. A municipality that funds the entire project through bonds should seek a positive cash flow year-after-year via revenues from tipping fees, recyclables and electricity sales, as well as sales of slag and sulphur. There is considerable range in the values for each of these variables, and any proposed development would require extensive due diligence to determine local prices for each line item. Tipping fees, electricity rates, commodity recyclables, as well as interest rates and taxes, all vary dramatically – creating a model which needs to be thoroughly evaluated for any proposed development.

The economics of waste gasification heavily favour recycling – inorganic materials like metal and glass have no value as fuel and make the gasification process less efficient, even though plasma torches have the ability to melt them. High-value plastics and papers that can be readily separated are far more valuable as recyclables than as fuel. Certain plastics earn €195 per tonne ($300 per US ton) and certain types of paper can earn around €53 per tonne ($75 per US ton). For comparison, a tonne of waste may produce 0.8 MW of electricity, worth around €51 ($70) per MW. It is clear that any of these materials that can be separated and sold, are worth much more as commodities than as fuel.

There are additional waste streams available in certain locations which earn higher tipping fees than MSW because they are toxic and yet have excellent fuel value. Refinery wastes from petroleum and chemical plants, medical waste, auto-shredder residue, construction debris, tyres and telegraph poles, are all examples of potential fuels that can earn high tipping fees and provide good heat value. Additionally, there are millions of tonnes of low-grade waste coal that exist in massive piles throughout the Appalachian region of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, US, that can be utilized for gasification.

Multiple outputs can be produced from a single facility. Heat and steam can be sold, and electricity production can be combined with ethanol or hydrogen production to maximize resources. Hydrogen can be readily produced from syngas by separating it from the carbon and oxygen, while synthetic natural gas can be produced by upgrading the methane content of syngas.

Liquid fuels are typically produced from syngas through catalytic conversion processes such as Fischer-Tropsch – which has been widely used since World War II to produce motor fuels from coal. Biotech methods to produce liquid fuels are also being developed to use enzymes or micro-organisms to make the conversion.

Much research and effort is being put into developing more selective catalysts and productive enzymes which will raise system efficiencies to levels needed to be competitive. Currently, ethanol from gasification costs more than $2 a gallon (equivalent of €0.37 per litre), and it is estimated that production needs to cost closer to $1.25 (€0.90) or $1.50 (€1.10). Production of ethanol at demonstration scale has shown that one US ton of MSW can produce around 100 gallons (equivalent of 0.9 tonnes producing 380 litres) of ethanol, give or take 20%. Cost estimation for ethanol production is difficult, but rough calculations indicate that ethanol could potentially be more profitable than electricity.

Gasification is superior to landfilling MSW for a number of reasons. First of all, landfills are toxic to the environment due to the production of toxic liquid leachate and methane gases. The EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) has a lengthy protocol for airborne and liquid chemicals which must be contained and monitored for every landfill. Landfills must be constructed with extensive liners, drains and monitoring equipment to comply with regulations. Plasma gasification can divert waste from landfills and create beneficial uses for the material, by maximizing recycling and cleanly using the rest for fuel.

Gasification is superior to incineration and offers a dramatic improvement in environmental impact and energy performance. Incinerators are high-temperature burners that use the heat generated from the fire to run a boiler and steam turbine in order to produce electricity. During combustion, complex chemical reactions take place that bind oxygen to molecules and form pollutants, such as nitrous oxides and dioxins. These pollutants pass through the smokestack – unless exhaust scrubbers are put in place to clean the gases.

Gasification by contrast is a low-oxygen process, and fewer oxides are formed. The scrubbers for gasification are placed in line and are critical to the formation of clean gas, regardless of the regulatory environment. For combustion systems, the smokestack scrubbers offer no operational benefit and are put in place primarily to meet legal requirements. Plasma gasification systems employing proper scrubbers have extremely low emissions and no trouble meeting and beating the most stringent emissions targets.

The objective of gasification systems is to produce a clean gas used for downstream processes which requires specific chemistry, free of acids and particulates – so the scrubbing is an integral component to the system engineering, as opposed to a legal requirement that must be met.

Incinerator ash is also highly toxic and is generally disposed of in landfills, while the slag from plasma gasification is safe because it is melted and reforms in a tightly-bound molecular structure.

In fact, one of the main uses for plasma torches in the hazardous waste destruction industry has been to melt toxic incinerator ash into safe slag. The glassy slag is subject to EPA Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP) regulations that measure eight harmful elements. Data from existing facilities, even those processing highly hazardous waste, has shown them to be well below regulatory limits.

Electricity production from plasma gasification is superior to that from incinerator combustion. Incinerators typically use the heat from combustion to power a steam turbine to produce power. Gasification systems can use gas turbines that are far more efficient, particularly when configured in integrated gasification combined cycle mode (IGCC). Just as IGCC is the state-of-the-art in producing power from coal, the same is true when using MSW as the fuel source.

The carbon impact of plasma gasification is significantly lower than other waste treatment methods. It is rated to have a negative carbon impact, especially when compared to allowing methane to form in landfills. Gasification is also an important enabling technology for carbon separation. It is primarily a carbon processing technology; it transforms solid carbon into gas form.

Syngas is comprised of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The hydrogen readily separates from the carbon monoxide allowing the hydrogen to be used while the carbon is sequestered. The US Department of Energy has identified gasification through its clean coal projects as a critical tool to enable carbon capture.

Environmentalists have expressed opposition to waste gasification for two main reasons. The first argument is that any waste-to-energy facility will discourage recycling and divert resources from efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle. Economic studies of the waste markets show the opposite to be true; waste-to-energy heavily favours the processing of waste to separate valuable commodities and to maximize its value for fuel.

The second argument made against waste gasification is that has the same emissions as incineration. These arguments are based on gasification systems which do not clean the gases and instead combust dirty syngas. Such systems are essentially two-stage burners and are not recommended for environmental reasons. There are many variations of combustion, pyrolysis and gasification – all used in different combinations. Proper engineering is required to achieve positive environmental performance.

In the late 1990s, the first pilot-scale plasma gasification projects were built in Japan to convert MSW, sewage sludge, and auto-shredder residue to energy. The Japanese pilot plants have been successful, and commercial-scale projects are under development now in Canada and other countries, by companies such as Alter NRG, from Alberta, Canada.

Ed Dodge is from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, USA

NAVY WATER FUEL

Here's an interesting story about the Navy wanting to create fuel from seawater. The hydrogen comes from water and the carbon comes from the high amounts of co2 in the water. It creates a type of gas called (syngas), synonym
producer gas, which is exactly the same type of gas which is produced by pyrolysis or plasma processes, that can be used just like natural gas or propane or compost methane. The project is transforming syngas one step farther, taking carbon dioxide and hydrogren, the components of syngas, and catalyzing them with an iron-based process to make them into olefins and complex hydrocarbons like kerosene and gasoline. Lies: fossil fuel(snake oil), scarcity of snake oil, that the US Navy would ever do anything beneficial to humanity versus the real snakes, elite deviants who have a scheme to enslave us by lies.