Making syngas from waste and then converting it to a liquid fuel, chemicals, or green hydrogen is an attractive goal for the circular economy – if the entire process works as planned.
The key to being able to finance, build, and operate a proposed facility is not only having a robust technology to meet market needs, but managing associated technical and project risk.
Waste gasification has often not met expectations. The principal reasons for this have been:
1. Unrealistic scale up;
2. High cost of feed preparation and/or insufficient feed flexibility to ensure a reliable feedstock supply at a projected price;
3. Gasifier not integrated with an adequate feed system and gas cleanup, so either EPC or the end customer has had a significant expense to make the system work;
4. Tar laden syngas unsuitable for anything but making steam; and
5. Low system availability, low cold gas efficiency, high parasitics and/or high opex.
Because of these issues, investors and lenders are rightfully cautious. In the U.K., most EPC’s will no longer provide an IChemE Red Book “wrap” for gasification projects. Clients in other locations are equally cautious.
Plasco has tailored its Gasification and Plasma Refining System (GPRSTM) to mitigate these risks.
As Jay Barney stated in his seminal textbook, “Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage”, to achieve long-term above average economic returns, a firm must pass the VRIO test. Its resources must be Valuable, Rare, hard to Imitate, and supported by the Organization. Plasco’s presentation will concentrate mostly on the “supported by the Organization” aspect of the GPRSTM. We will describe briefly the GPRSTM technology, but also the deliberate choices made by the organization to move the GPRSTM from a novel process demonstrated at a large scale over many years to a modular integrated low risk solution with predictable performance. These include:
1. Omnivorous high efficiency integrated waste conversion and syngas refining;
2. Syngas tailored to the end use;
3. Pristine environmental performance;
4. Choices to maximize uptime;
5. A trouble-free and cost effective delivery process; and
6. Financial backing and insurance to support a performance warranty
Speaker:
Marc Bacon,
EVP of Engineering and Operations,
Plasco Conversion Technologies