How Gasification Turns Waste Into Energy 

Managing any form of waste becomes easy the moment we start considering waste as a resource and not a problem

I was involved in a project supplying shredding and conveyor systems for the original Plasco plant in Ottawa in 2005. Even then you could see the advantages of gasification. Getting paid to take your waste and getting paid for the electricity being made sounded like a great way to reduce waste in our landfills.

PLEASE HAVE THIS TECHNOLOGY IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES. we are the most saturated countries with single use plastic like sachets. :(

I can turn myself into energy, that’s amazing.

I really admire Mike Heart's commitment in making a difference and his work with Sierra Energy. Kudos to you, Sir..

Great to see this getting going, really frustrating it's taking so long. Converting garbage to energy & other usable products should already be the norm!

For every missed mark and every set back and for everyone who keeps pushing forward...thank you. For never giving up.

I said this 20 years ago and I'm still saying it: Thermal Depolymerization ("Gasification") is our future.

Very interesting, thanks. This a very difficult process due to the very variable nature of the feedstock(Waste), and always vulnerable to rogue elements getting into the waste. I spent 30 years in the recycling business, every day saw new problems, actually we called them challenges. Good luck to all those trying so hard to make the world a better place.

I remember reading about this in Popular Science over a decade ago. It promised that landfills full of waste could be processed and left empty. Still waiting for the tech to happen.

This is how it works. We put stuff in the top and stuff in the bottom and we gat gas. Wow real in depth explanation

This technology has a great future, I'm convinced.

We currently waste so many resources transporting our trash and "recycling " to other countries where...oh damn a lot of it gets burned

It would sure be nice if this could take the place of landfills and recycling, along with creating a renewable fuel source through production of waste turned diesel fuel.

I hope someday we can have this kind of technology in the Philippines. The amount of waste here is just highly alarming. If I'd be a billionaire here, I'd spend it with this technology for sure. How I wish. Great job! 👍

The Japanese have technology that makes it possible to clean emissions from waste to electricity plants

This technology still has a 30% residue called char, which still has to be sent to landfill. Co-processing is a more efficient, affordable and scalable choice. The problem is the low landfill fees

We have been doing this for decades in Edmonton, Alberta. Our Cloverbar Dump has methane gas capture from old underground waste dumps. The gas is blended with natural gas for the nearby power plant and now we are scaling it up for feed into the nearby oil refineries. It's not some future energy. It's in our city now.

Good luck to you all! We need all the solutions we can get!

Great comparison of three processes. I worked in the steel industry for years. You don't put coal in the top of a blast furnace . It breaks down with heat and you get all sorts of crap out the top. Same with Lurgi gasifiers or any type of counter current process. That's why blast furnaces use coke, basically pure carbon. Same if you put in waste. You require extensive gas cleaning. Plasma a tricky heat input with electricity. I think the fluidized bed is the best bet. Relatively high uniform temperature breaks everything down into basic hydrogen and carbon monoxide and some CO2. A great use for syn gas would be for producing Direct Reduced Iron. The present process uses natural gas, sends it through a high temperature catalytic reformer to produce guess what ? Carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Use waste and leave the natural gas in the ground.

Building them individually for plants, cities and certain purposes is what counts, selling the energy back to the national grid and being paid to take on the waste too, putting the emissions underneath the ground for mother earth.

Thank you #CNBC, #Katie Brigham, and #Jeniece Pettitt for producing this video. This is exactly the kind of content that we want to watch and hear about!

CNBC: "We can produce gas with ovens." Austrian art school rejects: "Ja! It iz time!"

@15:15 so true.I really enjoyed this video,CNBC please keep us updated.

Higher Oil prices is the biggest incentive and ultimate solution to promote and encourage innovations & solutions to most of our environmental problems

This is genuinely a giant step in the right direction. It’s going to be a game changer! It’s potential will mushroom!!!

I live in Switzerland, next to an incinerator, elementary school, and park. Most European incinerators have efficient scrubbers so that there is no significant air pollution. In Switzerland you pay for city garbage bags to use for your non-recyclable trash (basically you pay per bag of trash). Recycling is free, so you are encouraged to recycle and reduce waste to save money. Trash goes to the incinerator and is converted to energy and the waste heat is used to heat water in the city. The USA has neglected to innovate its waste cycle because land for landfills have been so cheep, but it's time to make a change for the sake of the environmental impacts and to stop leaving our trash problems for future generations. Let's see how gassification evolves, but in the meantime incinerators with scrubbers are a good start.

CNBC is doing an awesome job with these videos. They are incredibly entertaining

If these were built to neighborhood scale, we could drive energy costs way down even further

This exactly!!!! Just this year I presented plasma gasification to my local waste management officials and they said a plant is already going up in my state's capital. Gasification is so cool and it would be amazing for the environment if it caught on!

We will be in contact with each of these 3 companies to establish a model in our region! Lets help make the hassel of trash a thing of the past!!

Already exist in Norway (Oslo).

Great job. A realistic solutions on the card. Need to understand about the waste composition, local atmospheric conditions and the projected waste composition etc

Please reduce the usage of disposable plastics. Disposable forks, spoons, plastic bags, cups, etc. are too much for our mother earth.

it seems to me that thermal treatment of municipal waste into synthesis gas has been carried out on a technical scale since the end of the 1990s in Europe (Karlsruhe 225,000 Mg / year, closed in 2004), and there are currently several such installations in Japan. However, the synthesis gas produced is used for energy production and not for the production of specific substances...

My dad used to work for a startup company that used gasification to turn farm waste into energy. It was about to get a deal with a local town to start supplying energy for them, but Ameren heard about it and convinced the town to not do it. The company went out of business. ☹

Theres a plant in my area that does exactly this. And I'm glad they do.

Very informative video. Great job reporting this CNBC.

Suddenly my faith in humanity has been restored.

This technology sounds amazing, and great for the planet. Only issue that I can see is large investment required, plants to be built. And then a study 10-20 years later to see if it works.

In sweden we've been burning waste in sweden for 20-30 years, while producing energy..

For certains feedstocks, combining anaerobic digestion and gasification could give better results.

This has been done small scale on rural farms for a while. Farmers and ranchers have been using windmills and methane digesters for electricity before any of us. Methane digesters have also provided steady cooking fuel in poverty stricken parts of Africa, reducing the prevalence of food-born illnesses. If cities did this and collected the bio waste from the town...kitchen scraps, leaves, grass clippings.. .they would nearly eliminate their fuel bills. Imagine city cars and buses running on renewable natural gas they produced? Disneyworld does it...so can we!

As an experienced chemical engineer having commissioned and operated Fisher Tropsch Syntheses plants and Heavy Oil Residue Gassification plants I fully agree with the waste gasification processes to produce methanol, ethanol, kerosine, etc. without producing any CO2 emissions. Please realise this gassification method which could also be applied to Coal-Gassification has a higher cost price of about 20 % in comparison with energy produced by combustion of coal, oil or natural gas. Possibly the cost reason is the only bottleneck for Waste and or Resid Oil/Coal Gassification. In Germany Leuna at the TOTAL Oil Refinery are 6 heavy residue visbreaker and FCC heavy bottoms oil gasification reactors in operation since 1999, producing methanol for MTBE production, for information. Regards, from Hulst, The Netherlands.

Gasification is a good idea. We should definitely have more gasification facilities in America. Is there a way to support these facilities?

So basically similar to a Flux Capacitor.

1:40 its over 9000!

This is really the most elemental form of recycling. A dedicated solar energy farm would make such an operation at least break-even. It's all about capturing and releasing energy. People are getting good at that.

Used all over the developed world. Very effective at waste management

I wish I could turn my gas into fuel 🥴

Plastics burnt in the absence of oxygen can be turned into crude oil. That could help lower cost of fuel and conflicts associated with hydrocarbons resources

You have a great voice to listen to. Your voice makes the information easy to understand. Thank you.

‘Soon’ is a pretty bad answer ngl

Philippines is looking for this kind of technology for a very long time. As We are limited in using land fill bec. We have a law thats banning burning of waste(clean air act). Hope you could pitch your product here.

There are numerous other videos here that show waste-to-energy plants that do still incinerate trash, but they capture the harmful emissions, only releasing clean steam into the air.

Consistently amazed by the high quality work CNBC puts out. You guys should start doing 20-60 min documentaries

The name should've been turning trash into cash.

Thank you for a definitive explanation of the different gasification methods. I've been interested in fluid bed gasifiers for many years. I have a background in industrial insulation and would love to see this technology be applied at a small community scale. Perhaps something skid mounted to be distributed, which would minimize long distance hauling of trash.

उनकी पहली प्राथमिकता गुड्स एंड सर्विस टैक्स जीएसटी होनी चाहिए, रेलवे के आधुनिकीकरण, विस्तार और उसे गति देने की योजना के बारे में पूछना चाहिए और उन्हें निवेश के लिए धन उपलब्ध कराना चाहिए, लेकिन राजमार्गों के मामले में गुंजाइश उससे भी ज्यादा है. आर्थिक संबंधों को नया स्वरूप मिलेगा.?👍👍👍👍👍

This would be interesting to see in small communities, like mine in Nova Scotia

We're starting from the wrong end of the situation. Solutions shouldn't be at the end result. We need to start at the beginning which is manufacturing 👍

Since I actually have a clue having dealt with coal gasification and synfuels, it takes energy to make the oxygen needed for the gasification, and energy to heat the biomass and gasify it. It takes energy to clean the gases produced (not all are friendly) and more energy to reform the gases into the actual gases (hydrogen and carbon monoxide) known as syngas to turn into usable products. Energy balance needed will require natural gas being burned and a negative energy balance.

Why do you add sub-titles for Professor Sushil Adhikari, but not for any of the others?! He speaks perfectly clearly.

So will this eliminate recycling as we know it today? I mean the “separate bin”. Recycling is extremely expensive but throwing everything in one bin and knowing that everything you throw out will be recycled into say electricity is extremely satisfying to hear. Plus it eliminates the terribly expensive cost of recycling.

I'm sorry but there's a mistake. Most incinerator plants have filters and they filter out the toxins

Go Canada. Great to see Canada leading the way in a lot of these technologies.

Please keep going. Fuel prices in the UK are currently at an all time high, we are being hammered from all directions. Please sell this to us, I'm sure your prices will be manageable and competition for the fat cats. We are a small land with far too many people in it and our plastic waste here is huge. My Country need your helps and fast. I believe you're the future for us. Thanks for all that you do.

We in India would love to have this one for our each city if it is commercially and environmentally successful

We need to tackle overpopulation, family planning should be enforced in relatively poorer countries to do so, combined with better healthcare and regular vaccination will do the job. Will also solve poverty in some cases.

I can do that already! I eat apples, digest them, then create gas at a personal level.😄

Good report. Thanks, Hope this gets going more. Loss of farmland to dumps is another good reason.

its the most sensible way to deal with our trash, I don't know why it isn't being used everywhere already.

This sounds like a breakthrough thats always 5 years away

Thanks government for making it so hard to innovate with your ever changing regulations.

That's a great reportage!! Thank you!

I LOVE❤THIS DOCUMENTARY

WHY ARE WE NOT FUNDING THIS?! This is an answer to two existential threats!

I am concerned with the viability of this technology because I've never heard of it and it's been around for a while. How they deal with toxic/poisonous materials in the garbage? How much might that eat away at their sustainability? How costly is it to remove those materials? Where does it go? Perhaps it's a non-issue for them at this point. Assuming gasification really picks up speed we could potentially excavate already existing landfills for energy, so long as there aren't any unforeseen drawbacks to that. Landfills already combust methane that builds up underneath, why not utilize that as well?

Dapat may ganyan sa pinas para malutas na Ang problem dyan sa payatas

This is so much better than recycling. There is no value for recycling plastic or paper since those quality is reduced due to the recycling process, you’ll just end up with the same problem but with less options to deal with the waste.

Plants like these could be a boon for certain countries in Africa, who have accepted kilotons of trash, including waste from electronics, from the Global North with nowhere to dump it. This could help bring down energy costs and bring stable electric power to more people. Of course, infrastructure issues need to be addressed, but I can see this solving more problems than it creates. Also, I wonder if this gasification can work with human solid waste.

The title reminded me of Back to the future 2 starting scene, when Doc filled Delorean with trash to power it

These type of companies should set up more and more units in entire world

A very encouraging video, it really looks like a brilliant idea to me !

E-Town Baby!

These pretzels are making me thirsty!

Velocys are building a plant in the UK which uses gasification of MSW as the first stage in a plant using Fischer Tropsch reactors to convert syngas into aviation fuel. Pound for pound there is 60x more energy in synthetic kerosene than there is the best battery in existence meaning it is perfect for aviation which is a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonize

Live in 'clean green' NZ where we have appalling levels of landfill and a weak recycling culture. Any convo with local council sees councillors more concerned with re-election than wanting to see the likes of this. Many thx for report :)

Oh man… This is wrong on so many levels… First, “gasification” is a very inefficient process, it takes a long time and yields a relatively small amount of gas, and in the meanwhile, all that waste sits there, rots, ferments, and disintegrates into pretty dangerous chemical compounds you have to deal with. We had a lot of gasification plants, which did not work with municipal waste (which can vary _wildly_ in its composition), but with agricultural waste (which is relatively consitent in its composition and is easy to ferment), but even that did not work, and I do not know of a single one, that could survive without government funding. And now, that said government reduces that funding, they close down one after the other, because they are simply not viable. Second, the reason why so many new waste incineration plants are built, is, because they actually _are_ economically, technically and ecologically viable, and what remains of the process, well, ashes are amongst the chemically most stable substances in existence, and even if should they contain stuff like toxic metals, ash is basically an ore, and a good form to store them and reclaim those metals later. Dioxines? Nope, what comes out of the firing stack is CO₂, N₂ and water vapour - everything else is held back in the filters, burned again, and stored as ash. Third, to continue with the environmental aspects, modern waste incinerators, well, you are better off living next to one than living next to a busy street. I do not know what standards they have in the U.S., but the catalytic filters a decently recent plant uses do, as I said, leave nothing but CO₂, N₂ and H₂O. Fourth, gasification does have a future, only not for municipal waste, but for sewage. Contrary to solid waste, it can be processed easily, has a great yield, and a great overall economic potential. So, the box you bought your pizza in? Forget it, burn it, makes more sense. What becomes of your pizza after digestion, well, that is another matter entirely, with great potential to replace gasses from fossile fuel. Chilli night for more electricity, baby! … I do not know where CNBC gets their information, but you can savely dismiss this video as non-factual.

13:10 "It's one of the most well established companies in the space" So you think, aliens don't have good companies?

I have a suggestion: if we have the ability to take the ashes of a cremated loved one and turn them into a diamond then why can’t we take all of the plastic waste and make super hard blocks. We could take those blocks and build entire islands in places that need more land. Like the island Japan built for a new airport near Tokyo. Those blocks could also be used to make road “beds” that are then paved over with cement or tarmac. There are potentially thousands of uses for blocks as hard as diamonds and we would actually be recycling plastic without harming the environment.

Very informative. BTW there are at least two quoted gasification technology companies in the UK.

It is NOT the flux capacitor!! This idea is Mr Fusion!

The incinerators are helpful specially nowadays of the pandemic, installations of those incinerators configured not to release carbon monoxides and harmful oxides, chuwastar, that also fully complies with environment standards for combustion of garbage and making energy as well for landfilling is no longer allowed, the laws were passed that protects both urban and rural areas not to have landfills as they are unhealthy due to lechete, that is harmful to the environment. Installations of those protects cities both urban and rural from any widespread virus disease infection.

Illinois needs to look into this

This is the conversation big corporations and businesses should participate. To be realist as significant generation become involved

I really wish we would stop blending ethanol into motor fuels

Gasification soon? One would hope. Remember though, fusion energy has been touted "as soon" for more than half a century. Billions of dollars and decades later were still waiting. Hopefully gasification is clean way forward.

Indeed as the speaker at the end says, we should address the methane from landfills, but as that comes primarily from biodegradable waste (kitchen and garden waste) - the first thing to do is proper segregation at source and proper composting

Great Video !!