Firm plans to vaporize garbage to produce electricity

~ The Florida plant will use a process similar to how lightning is formed in nature.

FORT PIERCE, Fla. -- Welcome to the future, where trash is fuel and landfills are obsolete.

While trash to power isn't a new idea, Geoplasma, a sister company of Atlanta-based Jacoby Development Inc., has a grand plan to take it into the science fiction realm and do away with dumps by vaporizing garbage into synthetic gas and steam to create electricity.

The company plans to build a $425 million plasma arc gasification facility in St. Lucie County, the first of its kind in the nation and the largest in the world. The facility should be up in about two years.

It will generate heat hotter than the sun's surface and will gasify and melt 3,000 tons of garbage a day by creating an arc between two electrodes and using high pressure air to form plasma. It's a process similar to how lightning is formed in nature.

St. Lucie County officials estimate their entire landfill -- 4.3 million tons of trash -- will be gone in 18 years.

No byproduct will go unused, according to Geoplasma. The plant will produce enough synthetic gas -- a substitute for natural gas -- to power up to 43,000 homes annually and to run the facility.

Molten material much like lava created from melted organic matter will be hardened into rock form, or slag, and sold for use in road and construction projects. It will also gasify sludge from the county's wastewater plant, and steam will be sold to a neighboring Tropicana Products Inc. facility to power the juice plant's turbines.

"This is sustainability in its truest and finest form," Geoplasma president Hilburn Hillestad said.

For years, some waste management facilities have been converting methane -- created by rotting trash in landfills -- to power. Plants also burn trash to produce electricity.

Houston-based Waste Management Inc., the largest private waste management company in North America, has processed 118 million tons of garbage into energy in the past 30 years, equivalent to about 120 million barrels of oil, said company spokeswoman Lynn Brown.

The company hopes to one day capture all usable methane gas from its more than 280 active landfills to create the renewable energy equivalent of about 22 million barrels of oil a year, Brown said.

But experts say population growth will limit space available for future landfills.

"We've only got the size of the planet. We can't create more space," said Richard Tedder, program administrator for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's solid waste division. "Because of all of the pressures of development, people don't want landfills. It's going to be harder and harder to site new landfills, and it's going to be harder for existing landfills to continue to expand as people move in next to them."

The facility in St. Lucie County, on central Florida's Atlantic Coast, aims to solve that problem by eliminating the need for a landfill. Only two similar facilities are operating in the world -- both in Japan -- but are gasifying garbage on a much smaller scale.

"It's high on the list of interest as far as the federal government," said Rick Brandes, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency's waste minimization division. "For the amount of energy produced, you get significantly less of certain pollutants like sulfur dioxide and particulate matter."

Brandes said the European Union is also studying the technology for reducing waste and producing power.

But Bruce Parker, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based National Solid Wastes Management Association, scoffs at the notion that plasma technology will eliminate the need for landfills. Americans generated 236 million tons of garbage in 2003, about 4.5 pounds per person, per day, according to the latest figures from the EPA. Roughly 130 million tons went to landfills -- enough to cover a football field 703 miles high with garbage.

"We do know that plasma arc is a legitimate technology, but let's see first how this thing works for St. Lucie County," Parker said. "It's too soon for people to make wild claims that we won't need landfills."

NASA began using similar technology in the 1960s to simulate heat generated during a spacecraft's re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. The technology is also used to melt steel from car parts.

The torch used in Geoplasma's design is made by Westinghouse Plasma Corp.

"It's really a form of artificial lightning," said Louis Circeo, director of Georgia Tech's plasma research division, which is helping with Geoplasma's development.

Circeo said that as energy prices soar and landfill fees increase, plasma arc technology will become more affordable.

"Municipal solid waste is perhaps the largest renewable energy resource that is available to us," Circeo said, adding that the process "could not only solve the garbage and landfill problems in the United States and elsewhere, but it could significantly alleviate the current energy crisis."

He said that if large plasma facilities were put to use nationwide to vaporize trash, they could theoretically generate electricity equivalent to about 25 nuclear reactors.

Geoplasma expects to recoup it's $425 million investment, funded by bonds, within 20 years through the sale of electricity and slag.

"That's the silver lining," said company president Hillestad, adding that St. Lucie County won't pay a dime.

The company expects to generate worldwide interest with the Florida facility, which will serve as a model to prove its effectiveness.

Leo Cordeiro, the county's solid waste director, said officials have been researching ways to reduce landfilled garbage for several years and reached out to Geoplasma for help.

"We didn't want to do it like everybody else," Cordeiro said. "We knew there were better ways."

County Commissioner Chris Craft said the plasma process "is bigger than just the disposal of waste for St. Lucie County."

"It addresses two of the world's largest problems -- how to deal with solid waste and the energy needs of our communities," Craft said. "This is the end of the rainbow. It will change the world."

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On The Net:

Geoplasma: www.geoplasma.com

Westinghouse Plasma Corp.: www.westinghouse-plasma.com