made from Municipal Solid Waste ‘Hybrid’ biofuels made from Municipal Solid Waste and renewable power D. Mignard and C.L. Pritchard, Institute for Energy Systems TOP: Active tipping area of an operating landfill in Perth, Western Australia Picture taken by Ashley Felton, Nov. 2006. LEFT: Burning oilfield during Operation Desert Storm, Kuwait (1991). Picture taken by Jonas Jordan, United States Army Corps of Engineers Below: Polar bear in Zoo de La Palmyre (France). © William Scot, Dec. 2005 Take three major challenges Security of fuel supply Global warming Waste disposal Take some well known solutions Biofuels Renewable energies such as wind or marine Hydrogen Landfilling and, (much better), recycling … Find out that they have limitations! Land availability, competition with food crops Variability of wind and marine energy could pose problem on power lines at high penetration of these sources of energy Awkward and energy intensive hydrogen storage (22 deliveries of compressed hydrogen needed to replace one petrol tanker) Continued methane emissions from landfill Use of high energy value waste, such as plastics, as filling material (!) What we are proposing here is a common solution to Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management, the provision of a more CO2-neutral alternative to fossil fuels that is truly sustainable, and reduced dependency on oil. MSW and renewable energy Municipal Solid Waste can be a carbon source for liquid fuels for transport, including methanol, mixed alcohols, petrol and diesel. Because it is deficient in hydrogen for the purpose of fuel synthesis, and because hydrogen can be produced from renewable energies (wind, wave, tidal, solar) via water electrolysis, we can design processes that efficiently convert both MSW and renewable energies to liquid fuels by combining gasification of MSW with electrolysis. Figure 1 (left) presents one such process. Figure 1: Example of ‘hybrid’ process for the production of transport fuels Progress, findings and outcomes so far Methanol synthesis should be relatively simple and straightforward to prepare on a large scale, in spite of the variability of renewable energy sources. More work required for synthesis of mixed alcohols (which would be safer than methanol if used by the general public) - this is the next phase of our work in laboratory, pending funding. Contact: d.mignard@ed.ac.uk and colin.pritchard@ed.ac.uk