Waste to Energy

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Comment by James Lutz on November 24, 2009 at 11:52am

A natural gas turbine has about 25% efficiency. A boiler system, about 35%. A combination system, using turbine exhaust to boil water, passing the steam back through the turbine is about 50 - 60% efficient.

Comment by Jay Rosenberg on November 24, 2009 at 7:46am

All, We have to stop being anecdotal, pollyannish, dolly 2 shoes, OMG there is technology. Energy is money! Do you think, there is ever a mention of installing a grid coupled with a 20% reduction in utility prices? Why are we leaving the tax payer out of the equation. We are paying for it. The EV industry group, say have I got a green solution for you -- yah $180B worth of it. Why do we have such lack of focus, insistence, and naivity. We got a medical crisis, how about cranking out doctors and nurses, or a WIIIIII game called make me a doctor. Guess what, it works. They aint gonna like their rice bowl being overturned. If the citizens had representation, like AARP with the grey tigers, we may even get somewhere. But, letting the bigs who ran detroit into the ground, or owners of companies that charge over 20% interest, tell us what our best interests are, and how to get their, on my pocket book, is sublime. Happy thankgiving!
My Energy solutions save the consumer money, cap electric bills etc. Slowly we are getting backing, not from the US, but abroad, where they can not afford electricity! Its LCD. We should not talk about X% Green by 20XX, we should insist on $.05/kWh in a few years. THen, guess what, if you produce electricity efficiently, by def. that means, consuming the energy stock, and greatly reduced GHG. Sannerwind@gmail.com

Comment by Karl Mayr on November 19, 2009 at 3:38pm

Hi Sid Abma,

The Picken's Plan family is very big in terms of where we have been.

Your comment about the potential for recovering waste heat from exhaust gases is worthy of comment. The rising cost of fuel, especially gas and diesel has driven the consumers (by nature of increasing costs) to look for many alternative forms of energy to replacle these fuels.

I once had a customer who could not understand why his gas bill was "through the roof" during the winter months. I was installing a solar hot water system.

Before the days of "natural gas and heating oil", people had wood stoves and each stove had a flue damper, a manually adjusted butterfly valve in the flue exhaust.
We ll my customer had a steam heating system in his basement (house built around 1920), and the exhaust form the boiler rose some 20 feet out a chimney.

Comment by Sid Abma on November 19, 2009 at 1:54pm

The Pickens Plan is to use more natural gas across the country and less coal and imported oil. There is a lot of natural gas available, and it could last a lot longer if the natural gas that is being consumed would be done at a lot higher efficiency. All across the country going up all those chimney's is HOT, wasted natural gas energy.
The technology of "condensing flue gas heat recovery" is designed to recover most of that waste energy before it gets blown into the atmosphere. Then COOL exhaust is vented into the atmosphere.
The DOE states that for every million BTU's recovered from these waste exhaust gases and utilized back in the building or facility, 118 lbs of CO2 will NOT be emitted into the atmosphere.
The Pickens Team must promote natural gas and increased natural gas energy efficiency, to make it last and reduce emissions. And the final product of using this natural gas efficiently, is that water will then be created, and this water can also be used efficiently. Compare that to coal.

Comment by James Lutz on November 19, 2009 at 12:24pm

Actually, grants shouldn't be provided for anything, by our federal government anyhow. The only way the feds are authorized to assist research is to provide patenting.

Comment by Stevan R. Grimes on November 19, 2009 at 12:12pm

Our most untapped natural Resources are our students and chemist of the future.
Grants should be provided for the research of many of these Ideas near Cattle feed lots, Dairy's, and waste Pond's; as well as landfills to further explore and test the many ideas submitted by members of the Pickens Plan

Comment by James Lutz on November 17, 2009 at 7:38pm

If it's easy to change the easily produced methane to an easily liquefied form via some sort of hydrocarbon chaining to say, butane, that would be an excellent way of packaging it for transport to be used as fuel or further chaining for plastics.

Comment by Karl Mayr on November 17, 2009 at 8:57am

Hi Waste to Energy Group,

Chemistry was a favorite subject to me, since it fascinates me how the hydrocarbon chains are a wonder of nature.

Our oil field hydrocarbon laboratory was set to where each hydrocarbon formation can be qualitatively and quantitatively analyzized, because the gas chromotography makes a plot of the various hydrocarbons as they pass through the gas separation stratum in the chromotograph.

So, hydrorcarbons from methane (gas) to ethane to propane to butane to pentane are measure per injection of a formation gas, such that each and every hydrocarbon bearing oil well formation has a unique make up.

I hope that my explanation is clear, and may be have some significance in capturing and separating the varous hydrocarbons from any kind of recovery process.

Please comments if you have expereince with hydrocarbon gas chromatography.
Karl from Tularosa

Comment by John Nistler on November 17, 2009 at 8:45am

J. Jay, we are also looking at Methane Digestion and possible electric generation. We have considered stationary hydrogen fuel stations though instead of combustion due to the availability of clean water as a viable by-product. If I can be of any help, please let me know.

Comment by John Nistler on November 17, 2009 at 8:32am

Hello Jeff,
Have considered the biomass conversion to oil, aka, biodiesel as a possible fuel outlet. The point is - unless we do the methane through hydrogen fuel cell electricity generation, we do not have any CO2 for pumping the algae. Not sure the growth would be sufficient to justify the related extraction equipment without the CO2, still have it under consideration, but do to expenditures, it may be more profitable to just sell the methane or methanol.

always open to suggestions and approaches that make it feasible. But that stage of the operation is at least a year down the road. Need to get through the next few months first. :-)

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