Less Waste, More Energy (Kore Infrastructure)

December 05, 2023

Print This Article Share it With Friends

(Climate Now) ... Steve Wirtel, the Executive Vice President of Business Development at Kore Infrastructure, joined Climate Now to explain how Kore’s biomass thermal conversion (slow pyrolysis) process can be used to dispose of organic waste, sequester carbon and generate energy. We explore how Kore’s modular design works, how it can be adapted for various feedstock inputs and consumer products (including hydrogen), how this kind of technology is financed, and how slow pyrolysis can align with emission reduction legislation and environmental justice objectives.

...

Kore’s, onsite biogas installations deploy a process called pyrolysis to convert woody biomass waste, things like corn husks, forest deadfall, peanut shells, into usable gases.

Pyrolysis isn’t new by any means, but the number of companies deploying pyrolysis to transform one kind of material into another that’s economically [00:13:00] useful is fairly small, and the technology can be capital intensive. Kore, however, aims to make pyrolysis feasible for individual farms and industrial sites alike.

Steve Wirtel: Kore has a pyrolysis technology that converts what we would previously have placed in a landfill or incinerated and convert it into carbon negative renewable energy that can, you know, not only reduce atmospheric, carbon dioxide, but provide zero emission transportation fuel to decarbonize transportation, which is still the largest percentage of greenhouse gas emissions in the country.

James Lawler: So let’s move through exactly what the process is. So my understanding is it’s a pyrolysis process that starts with the bio feedstock. Explain what that means. So what kind of feed stocks can go into a Kore pyrolyzer. What happens and what are the outputs?

Steve Wirtel: So our, our focus [00:14:00] is principally on low moisture, lignocellulosic feedstocks; woody biomass. So think things like orchard- low moisture, agricultural residuals, nutshells fruit pits, and tree removals and tree prunings.

James Lawler: Mm-hmm.

Steve Wirtel: You know, California’s one of the largest orchard industries on the globe, and every year 10% of those trees from almonds, pistachios, walnut, citrus, avocado, have to be removed and replaced to maintain productivity. That generates a whole lot of biomass feedstock.

So that’s just one basket of fiber, if you will. A few others include dead trees in forests. Other waste include demolition wood from urban areas, so every time a building is demolished and rebuilt, there’s lots and lots of wood that’s generated and needs to be managed and historically would go into a landfill, and [00:15:00] we could talk about landfill diversion requirements in California that are no longer allowing that, but that’s another feedstock for us as well as what’s called green waste.

So the stuff that you would put in your green can if you have source separated organics in your community. Lawn clippings, tree branches, leaves, general landscaping materials from urban communities.

James Lawler: This woody biomass feedstock then goes to Kore’s pyrolysis installations, which look like mini industrial refineries taking up about an acre of space. Kore can actually ship the components of a pyrolysis installation pre-assembled to a project site. The feedstock is ground up into woody pellets and heated to super high temperatures in an oxygen free environment. With no oxygen, the biomass doesn’t burn, instead, part of it turns into a mixture of gases. That phenomenon is called devolatilization.

Steve Wirtel: So that gas can be used directly to produce heat, power or steam, depending on a particular client’s application. [00:16:00] Or we could take that gas and upgrade it to other renewable energy products, one of which that is growing rapidly in, in California in particular, is hydrogen.

Uh, hydrogen for fuel cell applications, particularly in the mobility sector for cars, trucks, buses, and trains to decarbonize transportation. So that’s one half of the equation. The other half then is what’s left behind. And what’s left behind after devolatilization occurs is the fixed carbon and ash that came in in the original feedstock. And that fixed carbon and ash becomes what’s commonly referred to as biochar. We like to refer to as biocarbon, because we believe it actually has higher quality properties than standard biochars. That biochar, in particular, our biocarbon has some very interesting attributes.

The most important of which is that the fixed carbon that remains [00:17:00] behind is recalcitrant, meaning it will not revert to carbon dioxide or methane in the environment. So it’s a form of carbon sequestration. And when that carbon is placed into the soil, for instance, it will remain there for greater than a hundred years.

...

Steve Wirtel: Yeah. Well, the, the process uses very little electricity on the order of 50 kilowatt hours per ton of material processed, because there’s very slowly rotating equipment and there’s not much of it. The main energy that’s required is the heat to raise the feed stock to that operating temperature of a thousand degrees or more. And we could generate that heat by utilizing some of the biogas that’s produced. So that would then be what’s considered a parasitic load. So we would take a percentage of that gas, it’s on the order of 20% or so, and use that to feed the burner that heats the feed stock up to its temperature.

But if we could co-locate with a facility that has some form of waste heat, for instance, if there was either [00:20:00] solar heat or waste heat from, say, a biomass power plant or other facility, then we could utilize that heat to raise the temperature of the feed stock, which would lower the carbon intensity of the whole process, which would increase its credit value, at least from a low carbon fuel standards standpoint as the transportation fuel in California.

...

Now let me add one more layer to this discussion because the future could very well be that we start to grow for-purpose crops. So we grow things like hemp, bamboo, miscanthus, or even algae so that we’re removing carbon in real time, putting it through our process and putting it into the ground in real time within say, you know, a a year or whatever is the harvest time for that crop.

So once we get beyond the waste management situation, now we can start to really accelerate [00:28:00] decarbonization by using for-purpose crops to again, use the ecosystem services of plants to start taking that carbon outta the atmosphere and getting it into the soil where it belongs.

...

So we’ve, we’ve been operating at commercial scale in downtown Los Angeles for a little over a year.

We had a 24 ton per day processing facility operating in partnership with Southern California Gas on a site that they owned just south of the Arts District in, in downtown Los Angeles. That projects operate in, in operating for over a year. We confirmed the mechanical integrity of the system and its ability to withstand the temperatures that the process has to operate at.

And we have, had an [00:31:00] engineer review our system and, and certify that have met that mechanical and thermal integrity, it’s a company called Leidos. They’ve provided us with a report that certifies that. Our next step now is to move forward with testing a range of commercial feedstocks and demonstrating that we can process those feedstocks and produce hydrogen, and that’s our goal over the next year.

So we’ve moved our equipment, again, this is where the skid-mounted feature becomes attractive. Our, our arrangement with SoCalGas ended, they wanted to use the site for something else, so we picked up our equipment and moved it to Lancaster, California to another co cohost location. READ MORE/LISTEN