Gasification and Pyrolysis: Introducing Advanced Technologies for Clean Sustainable Energy

Gasification with pyrolysis are important technologies, which are about to become much more important and are known as Advanced Thermal Treatment Technologies.

Stay with us while we try to bridge the gap between the technical expert-only web sites/ manufacturer's jargon and acronym filled sites, and the superficial treatment of these technical issues seen in the media generally.

Our aim is to enable the intelligent reader to grasp a thorough understanding of these complex technologies.

"In the years to come society must develop new sustainable energy technologies, or civilisation will surely not last long due to runaway climate change, and resource depeletion."

What are Gasification and Pyrolysis?

Pyrolysis and gasification, like incineration, are options for recovering value from waste by thermal treatment. The basic technology concepts are not novel but, recently, several new proprietary processes have been developed which hold promise for a huge expansion of the use of these renewable energy technologies.

PYROLYSIS is the thermal degradation of carbon-based material in the absence of air to produce char, pyrolysis oil and syngas (eg the Conversion of wood to charcoal).
                                               
These technologies are being used in two parallel markets, which are categorised as:

1. PROCESSES TO DIVERT MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE AWAY FROM LANDFILL

2. PROCESSES TO UTILISE BIOMASS SOURCES TO PRODUCE ENERGY FOR PROFIT

We shall discuss the application of Advanced Thermal Treatment (ATT) Technologies to process municipal solid waste (MSW). In the UK the term excludes incineration of wastes as this is considered already to be a mature and well established technology - and thus does not warrant the description of "advanced".Incineration nevertheless may, we accept, be implemented in an advanced manner fully in compliance with the European Union Waste Incineration Directive.

An Introduction to Gasification and Pyrolysis - a brief description of each:

The gasification and pyrolysis of solid materials is not a new concept. Both these related technologies have been used extensively to produce fuels such as charcoal, coke and town or producer gas. in the case of charcoal for millennia and coke for something like the last 200 years.

Charcoal and coke are produced by pyrolysing wood and coal respectively and "producer or syngas" or process gas is generated, this being a combustible gas produced by the action of gasification in the presence of air and/or steam.

It is only in recent years that such pyrolysis and gasification have been commercially applied to the treatment of MSW. The development of pyrolysis and gasification technologies is in its infancy in the United Kingdom, but large scale plants have been built and are in operation in Europe, North America and Japan, and will soon come on line in the UK as well.

Visit our other pages, as listed below for more information:

Gasification Plant Technology Case Studies
Gasification and Pyrolysis Articles
Advanced Thermal Treatment Basics

Please Note: "Gasification is said to be the cleanest, most efficient combustion method known. This is evident even for wood-gas stoves which can be started, operated and stopped with very low emissions and can use a wide variety of biomass fuels."

THE MAIN COMPONENTS OF A GASIFICATION or PYROLYSIS PLANT

ATT facilities vary in their components. Each of the technology providers which offers these plants adopts a slighlty differenet approach. However, an ATT plant will typically consist of the following key elements:

• Waste reception, storage, handling and pre-treatment;

• Thermal treatment reactor (where the gasification, pyrolysis etc process takes place);

• Gas and residue treatment plant (purification of syngas such as removal of corrosive substances before combustion);

• Energy recovery plant (although in some process this might be on another site);

and

• Emissions clean-up to ensure that the gases discharged comply with all applicable air quality regulations.

Why Use Gasification?

Today, the world demand for renewable energy sources is the key factor in the revival of the use of gasification systems, which has been was in strong decline throughout the age of cheap petroleum, which is now in the past.

Gasification systems can be particularly successfully when applied to the production of energy from biomass. They also represent an attractive alternative to the well-established thermal treatment systems for the recovery of energy from solid wastes.

Gasification is particularly suitable to treat industrial wastes but there are some problems with municipal solid wastes related to their heterogeneity.

What is the Advantage of Gasification?

The process of gasification is more efficient in producing controllable energy than ordinary incinerator combustion, and can produce useful by-products, allowing the extract of more useful energy and chemical compounds from carbonaceous materials and biomass, than would be available by burning them.

Gasification processes can also be coupled up with carbon capture and storage, which cannot be achieved by incineration, in the same way.

Exactly What is Biomass - watch our video and find out!