1. 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
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: and