Fast Trash

Just when you thought the rise in air fares due to fuel surcharges was enough to make you hold your nose, an American company is turning to the trash heap for a potential solution.

Aiming to produce high performance jet fuel, The Washington, DC-based Solena Group has developed a process that transforms industrial, municipal or organic waste into a synthetic bio-gas, or syngas. And while technical labels like Plasma Gasification and Vitrification (SPGV) and Integrated Plasma Gasification Combined Cycle (IPGCC) may seem overwhelming, the project’s premise is easy to understand: turn the sickly kind of green you find growing in the garbage into the kind of green that powers airplanes. And it gets greener.

In a white paper (172KB PDF) published in 2007, the company claims its product is able to convert “all organic materials, including biomass and waste products, into clean energy, with net-zero CO2 emissions and no polluting emissions.” Together with Rentech, Inc., another American company, Solena plans to open a Northern California facility in 2009 designed to produce 1,500 to 3,000 barrels of syngas per day. If the two companies can find buyers for their trash-turned-jet fuel that won’t be enough, given a single Boeing 747, for example, burns five gallons of kerosene every mile it flies.

The process of creating liquid hydrocarbons from other stuff isn’t necessarily new technology, with German researchers Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch creating the appropriately named Fischer-Tropsch_process in 1920. But where Fischer and Tropsch began with coal in a time when “greenhouse gas” still referred to the smell from rotting hothouse cucumbers, Solena and Rentech are selling their process on its low environmental footprint and, let’s face it, the chutzpah of turning the trash we hate into the fuel we need.

In this case, both the fuel and the smell will be reaching to high heaven.