Why Gasification?
One of the most compelling challenges of the 21st Century is finding a way to meet national and global energy needs while minimizing the impact on the environment. Gasification can help meet those challenges.
- Gasification is a time-tested, reliable, and flexible technology that converts carbonaceous materials, biomass, municipal waste, scrap tires and plastics into a clean high energy gas.
- The PowerHearth produces a clean, particulate-free gas that can be used to fuel industrial boilers or to power internal combustion or turbine engines with generators to produce megawatts of electricity.
- Gasification does not involve combustion, (or burning), but instead is a thermal chemical process that uses high temperature in a controlled environment, with limited oxygen, to convert carbon-based materials directly into a high energy ‘producer gas’. The gasification process breaks these materials down to the molecular level, so impurities can be easily and inexpensively removed.
- The high-temperature combustion refines out corrosive ash elements allowing clean gas production from otherwise problematic fuel sources.
- Gasification can recover the energy locked in biomass and municipal solid waste — converting those materials into valuable products and eliminating the need for incineration or landfill.
- Gasification has been reliably used on a commercial scale for more than 50 years in the refining, fertilizer, and chemical industries, and for more than 35 years in the electric power industry.
- Gasification produces electricity with significantly reduced environmental impact compared to traditional technologies.
- Gasification plants bring good jobs to a community – construction jobs needed to build a plant, and well-paying permanent jobs needed to run the plant.
- Compared to the old coal-burning plants, gasification can capture carbon dioxide much more efficiently and at a lower cost. This capture technology is being successfully used at gasification plants in the U.S. and worldwide.
- Gasification is an investment in our energy future.
Gasification is not incineration
Gasification is not incineration. Incineration is the burning of fuels in an oxygen-rich environment, where the waste material combusts and produces heat and carbon dioxide, along with a variety of other pollutants. Gasification is the conversion of feedstocks into their simplest molecules - carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane forming a syngas or producer gas that can be used for generating electricity or producing thermal heat.