Technology Harnesses Waste Gases for Power

by Tom Bryan (Ethanol Producer Magazine) ... Castro (Alain Castro, CEO of Irvine, California-based Ener-Core) means he believes Ener-Core’s patented Power Oxidizer, which turns low-value industrial waste gases into base-load, on-site power, is poised to change the way industries manage and utilize the gases most of them currently consider a liability. The oxidizers come in 250-kW and 333-kW sizes, and Ener-Core recently completed the primary construction of a highly anticipated 2-MW unit, which will be integrated with a Dresser-Rand gas turbine. One of the first major adopters of the modified turbine will be a Pacific Ethanol plant in Stockton, California, which is waiting for the 2-MW unit to be fully tested.

“They’re planning to install two of our systems,” Castro says. “And they’ve determined that once the systems are installed—and we expect that to happen this summer—they will drop their operational costs by $3 million to $5 million a year. That’s a huge cost advantage for an ethanol plant.”

“It’s a very good fit for pollution control—it is the best available control technology—and it helps reduce our operating costs,” says Pat McKenzie, director of corporate engineering at Pacific Ethanol. “When we’re finished with the installation of the power oxidizer at our Stockton facility, we’re going to take those results and look at how it fits into our operations in the remainder of our facilities in North America.”

Pacific Ethanol will reduce its operating costs and become an inordinately clean ethanol plant when it adopts oxidizer-integrated turbines. But Castro says the latter benefit is not the ethanol producer’s chief motivation for change. “They’re not doing this just to be clean,” he says. “This goes way beyond state and federal air emissions standards. They don’t have to go this far. They’re doing this because it gives them a cost advantage and because they’ll be better prepared for the next ethanol price drop.”

Castro’s list of prospective Power Oxidizer buyers includes ethanol plants, distilleries, oil refineries and petrochemical plants, semiconductor manufacturing plants, animal rendering plants, coal mines, wastewater treatment plants and more. “We think we can make them all more efficient and more cost competitive,” he says. “They all have waste gases, spend lots of money on energy, and are exposed to increasingly strict air-emissions standards. All three of those problems can be taken care of with our technology.”

According to the U.S. EPA, industrial and commercial emissions represent about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. If all of the industrial waste gases flared around the world were converted to energy, Castro says, 70 to 100 gigawatts of power would be generated—enough power for every home in the United States for a year. READ MORE