COP21 & Climate Finance, investment or assistance?

As the discussions in Paris are getting hotter, some serious dilemmas are getting more obvious – unfortunately, we are still far away from having a common and targeted response to the questions posed. Let’s see the example of Bangladesh. With a population of 140 million, Bangladesh is one of the world's most populated countries. It is also one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Cyclones, floods and droughts have long been part of the country's history and they have intensified in recent years. As a result of the long exposure to these hazards, Bangladesh is a world leader in adaptation strategies but this has come with a heavy price tag. Bangladesh’s Ministry of Finance has been working with the UNDP-UNEP Poverty-Environment Initiative to launch its first comprehensive climate change accounting system. The results of the financial review were really astonishing.

Bangladesh currently spends $1 billion a year, 6 to 7% of its annual budget, on climate change adaptation. This is roughly 20% of the World Bank’s forecasted adaptation budget for the next 35 years! But it was spent just for one year (but this is another story, there are a lot of questions about the reliability of those long-term forecasts and their documentation). The facts reveal that 75% of money spent on climate change in the country comes directly from the government, while 25% comes from international donors. There is one more shocking detail: the average European citizen emits as much carbon in 11 days as the average Bangladeshi in an entire year.  

Then, allow me to come back to my previous post on Climate Justice. We can’t put the burden for fighting climate change and funding adaptation strategies to the citizens of Bangladesh, we simply can’t ask them to pay for their protection from the pollution that the Western World has created – but this is exactly what’s happening now, in many cases, as the case of Bangladesh. If we don’t stop this practice, we simply erode any reliable agreement on Climate Change – as I have already written there is no real agreement without Climate Justice.

Ok, but someone can say that rich countries are committed to provide 100 billion dollars to developing countries by 2020. On December 2, the US special envoy for climate change Todd Stern had told a press conference that donor countries were “well on the way to beating that pledge”. But allow me to mention that I have some doubts about those 100 billion dollars. Initially, I doubt a little bit about if those money will be, finally, available and also, I have my questions regarding the time horizon in which they will be given. In addition “If today’s public adaptation finance were divided among the world’s 1.5 billion smallholder farmers in developing countries, they would get around $3 each year to cope with climate change – the price of a cup of coffee in many rich countries,” as Oxfam’s climate policy adviser Jan Kowalzig recently said.

But, unfortunately, I have a more important doubt. Are those 100 billion dollars going to be given as loans (which means actually as an investment that will provide a certain profit) or as grants? Is it going to be recognition that rich countries have to pay a big part of the bill they have created or it will be one more way to create long-term dependencies of the poor countries? Gambia’s environment minister, and representative of the least developed countries group, Pa Ousman Jarju was absolutely right when he said: “We cannot take loans to pay for climate change and take that as climate finance. For us it needs to be grant-based finance because we are not responsible for what is happening.” So, let’s hope he will be heard, but let’s think that if the rich countries follow the path of loans, any climate deal will be fragile, ineffective and it will create much more problems than it will resolve.

COP 21: No deal on Climate Change without Climate Justice

As the European Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete announced that EU is ready to work day and night for a right climate deal in Paris, it was really out of my control to combine and compare this statement with the EU’s statements and the actions taken for the refugees. "The EU will fight for a very ambitious deal. When you have 196 parties, the easy way out is to agree a minimalistic agreement," Miguel Arias Canete told reporters and he continued "We will work day and night to have an ambitious agreement that is fit for purpose". Clearly the 28 EU member states will be unified and supportive for a new climate deal.

Well, that’s fine but compare this statement with the delayed, completely uncoordinated, sometimes racist and finally ridiculous discussion about the EU refugees’ crisis. As The Guardian recently wrote “Months of European efforts to come up with common policies on mass immigration unraveled on Sunday when Germany led a “coalition of the willing” of nine EU countries taking in most refugees from the Middle East, splitting the union formally on the issues of mandatory refugee-sharing and funding. An unprecedented full EU summit with Turkey agreed a fragile pact aimed at stemming the flow of migrants to Europe via Turkey. But the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, frustrated by the resistance in Europe to her policies, also convened a separate mini-summit with seven other leaders to push a fast-track deal with the Turks and to press ahead with a new policy of taking in and sharing hundreds of thousands of refugees a year directly from Turkey”. So, we are ready for an ambitious climate deal but we are 100% unprepared and (many) unwilling to deal with the stream of refugees that are coming mainly from Syria – so how are we going to deal with the roughly 200 million climate refugees that are expected for the next 20-30 years?

The question is not theoretical at all. Between 2008 and 2013, some 140 million people were displaced by weather-related disasters; meanwhile, gradual displacements, such as those caused by droughts or sea-level rise, affected the lives of countless others. Today’s policies on climate change cast migration as an impending humanitarian catastrophe and as a failure to adapt to changing environments back home. As a result, policies focus on reducing migration, commonly assuming that overwhelming flows of migrants from poor countries will be flooding industrialized countries. But many believe that climate migration is one of the most important ways for climate adaptation.

In the recent report State of the World 2015, it is clear that there are two policy options for climate refugees. The first is to provide migration opportunities for the most vulnerable populations, including improving access to resources, information, and networks to allow them to relocate. The second opportunity lies in adapting destinations, such as urban areas in developing countries, to host and integrate communities of migrants. One of the report’s contributors, Francois Gemenne commented that “The paramount goal of policy responses should be to enable people’s right to choose which adaptation strategy is best suited for their needs. This implies that people should be entitled with both the right to stay and the right to choose.” He also noted “Current adaptation policies tend to focus on the right to stay. Today, governments are aiming to reduce the number of people who are forced to migrate, ignoring those who might in fact prefer to leave but are forced to stay against their will or ability. Extending the migration options of populations…would require a broader development agenda.” Clearly this is a key – issue of the emerging movement for Climate Justice. There are many different definitions of Climate Justice but I prefer this one, as the Global JusticeEcology Project proposed it.

Climate Justice is “The historical responsibility for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions lies with the industrialized countries of the Global North. Even though the primary responsibility of the North to reduce emissions has been recognized in the UN Climate Convention, the production and consumption habits of industrialized countries like the United States continue to threaten the survival of humanity and biodiversity globally. It is imperative that the North urgently shifts to a low carbon economy. At the same time, in order to avoid the damaging carbon intensive model of industrialization, countries of the Global South are entitled to resources and technology to make a transition to a low-carbon economy that does not continue to subject them to crushing poverty. Indigenous Peoples, peasant communities, fisherfolk, and especially women in these communities, have been able to live harmoniously and sustainably with the Earth for millennia. They are now not only the most affected by climate change, but also the most affected by its false solutions, such as agrofuels, mega-dams, genetic modification, tree plantations and carbon-offset schemes”.

As India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed during the 2015 UN General Assembly 

"When we think of climate change, somewhere we try to safeguard our personal interests. But if we talk of climate justice, we spontaneously resolve to keep the poor safe during natural disasters".

 So let me finalize putting one more question. How is it possible to have a fair climate deal without Climate Justice? Is it possible, at all, to have a successful fight against climate change without a global, coordinated and fair response to the climate refugees? And how about considering climate migration as one of the key-ways for adaptation?

I will come back to those questions very soon, but until then think that we have to change our attitude: mass migration and massive refugees’ streams should not be considered as crisis anymore – they are the new normal reality in the planet we made!

Climate Change is as alarming as Paris Attacks!

We are all aware of the recent Paris Attacks by ISIS that resulted in a massacre. At least 89 people were killed inside the Bataclan concert hall, while at least 29 died at three restaurants. More than 350 were injured and many remain in hospitals. Although we are still shocked, we do hope that Paris will soon recover and become again the city that Ernest Hemingway describes like this “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” But there is another good reason to think on Paris and this is the upcoming COP on Climate Change. And I have a very clear message about it. 

Climate change is going as alarming as the Paris Attacks. 

I suppose that most of us are aware of the climate change impacts and the long-term irreversible problems that will be created. I also suppose that many people, although they do not doubt at all for the core climate change arguments, are thinking that sometimes the impacts and the urgency are somehow exaggerated. Of course, there are climate change deniers (some of them as serious as Donald Trump who recently twitted “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice”).  And, finally, there is a also a huge grey area of people that are thinking that “the scientific facts are too complex to be understood” or that “this is one more sign of the environmental catastrophe that is often predicted” or simply that “ok, but human are too genius and they will find their way to manage the problem”.

Well, allow me to say something in a very clear way. What we have to do, right here, right now, is to react in a red alarm that is becoming louder and louder, day-by-day. All the recent scientific facts confirm that this is a full-blown crisis. Let me recap some of the ones I went through this summer, with the valuable help of Jeremy Grantham and his great GMO Newsletter.

Visible changes in the climate have been accelerated; many more records than normal of droughts, floods, and, most particularly, heat have been achieved. Last year was the hottest year ever recorded, and this year, 2015, helped by an El Niño, has gotten off to a dreadful start. This year, global average surface temperatures are likely to reach 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), above preindustrial temperatures for the first time, according to the UK Met Office. This puts the world halfway to the internationally agreed warming target of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.  Other data, also recently released, shows that 2016 will be the first year in all of human history when the amount of carbon dioxide in the air meets or exceeds 400 parts per million for the entire year. As of 2014, that annual figure was 397.7 parts per million, which is an astonishing increase of 143% from the level in the air prior to the industrial revolution, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). According to the Met Office, the world has already emitted around two-thirds of the carbon dioxide it can put into the atmosphere to have a likely chance (more than 66% chance) of limiting warming to below 2 degrees Celsius.

The World Wildlife Fund, “Living Planet Report,” published in September, 2014, estimates the disastrous decline in total animal life: in general it has halved in the last 40 years, with bird populations down 40%.  The recent report (end of 2014) of the Audubon Society “Audubon’s Birds and Climate Change Report: A Primer for Practitioners” presents the damage likely to be inflicted on future bird populations by climate change and it highlights that maybe in the next 40-60 years we will have a very limited bird population. The excellent SCIENCE Article, “Marine IceSheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for Thwaites Glacier Basin, WestAntarctica” announces that the Thwaites Glacier4 in the Antarctic has “gone irreversible”. There are also several recent articles that deal with the direct thermodynamic effects of a warming climate, which account for most of the increase in extreme temperature events. In a simplified way they state that climate change may not cause more hurricanes or more droughts, but when they do occur, the higher ocean and air temperatures will guarantee that these events will be worse than they would have been in a lower-temperature world. In a great paper titled “Contrasting futures for ocean and society from differentanthropogenic CO2 emissions scenarios”, published on July 2015, at Science, 22 scientists led by Jean-Pierre Gattuso argue that any new global climate agreement must begin to minimize the mounting toll on the world’s oceans to prevent irreversible damage. They also mention that oceans are not receiving their appropriate share of concern while ocean life is diminishing at the fastest rate since the so-called Great Dying of 250 million years ago.  One of the co-authors, professor Hoegh-Guldberg said “There’s compelling evidence that increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are already resulting in fundamental changes to the physical, chemical, and biological properties of our planet”.

Last but not least, Andy Lee, in his article on July 2015 "The conflict between demographics and water in the Middle East", puts the water stress in Middle East as a cornerstone of the current and the emerging conflicts. He states “Bloomberg recently reported that water levels on the Euphrates River that
flows from Eastern Turkey through Syria to Iraq have fallen more than 50% this year, withering farmers’ crops and raising the risk of a wider regional conflict. Both Iraq and the Islamic State say that Turkey needs to release more water from its dams to replenish the river in the former Fertile Crescent where drought conditions now endanger millions. The situation for Iraq has grown even more acute after Islamic State used a dam captured in Ramadi to cut off water to government areas. The situation will only get worse as Turkey is due to complete the last 6 dams in a 22 dam project on the Euphrates and Tigris next year despite Iraqi protests. As the surrounding soils dry out, less water is absorbed into the ground. The Euphrates and Tigris have the second fastest
rate of groundwater storage loss after India according to Chatham House. A NASA study of the two river basins shows stored freshwater water reserves of 144 cubic kilometers, equal to the Dead Sea or 152% of the two countries’ 2008 annual renewable water resources, were lost over the 7 years through 2009. Soils drying up accounted for about 20% of the loss, with surface water from lakes and reservoirs another 20%, and the rest was depleted from underground aquifers. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise. Does this explain some of the fighting in the region, and the low value people put on their own lives? What happens when the aquifers are exhausted as they surely will be in the next few years?”

There is no time left – adaptation and mitigation strategies are going too slow. As many people believe, it seems that we need something like a Marshal Plan for planet Earth. And probably this plan will cost trillions of dollars. But just a minute, let’s think again about the costs. In 2015, the global military expenditures were 1.7 trillion dollars.  For the years 2010 – 2015, the global military expenses were roughly 10 trillion dollars! Each year we spent 75-80 billion dollars for cyber security and 70 billion dollars for pet food. And according the Global Subsidies Initiative “Globally, subsidies to fossil fuels may be on the order of US$ 600 billion per year, of which the GSI estimates about US$ 100 billion is provided to producers. Nobody knows the real number, however, because there is no international framework for regularly monitoring fossil-fuel subsidies”.

So, how much money we need to tackle climate change? What will be the cost of a Marshal Plan for Earth? Many different groups converge to something like 150 – 200 billions dollars per year.  This is just double of the global spending on pet food! It is less than 10% of the global military spending and 25% of the subsidies given to fossil fuels! Recently, Thomas Piketty proposed a flight tax to raise 150 billion dollars climate funds per year. According his proposal, air travel should be taxed to protect the world’s vulnerable from drought, flooding and sea level rise. A €180 ($196/£130) levy on business class tickets and €20 on economy class would raise the estimated €150bn a year needed for climate adaptation.

I am sure that there are many other creative ways to find the, finally, tiny amount of money required every year. So the problem is not the availability of funds.

The problem is that one-tenth of people are responsible for 45% of global emissions. Sunita Narain, the director of the Indian Centre for Science and Environment, recently said "We must put an end toenvironmental colonialism. Individuals have a right to development, whereverthey are…The problem is that the United States will manage to get their total lack of ambition accepted in the Paris agreement, which means Africa and India will have no room for development". As Piketty recently explained in Guardian "the countries of the North should be convinced to finance more adaptation. Climate change adaptation funds currently stand at $10 billion, while the United Nations Environment Programme estimates the need at 200 times this amount". Piketty recalled the fact that the media always present the United States and China as the biggest emitters, responsible for 42% of global CO2 emissions, with Europe far behind at only 10%."But if you factor in the emissions of products consumed, Europe's CO2 emissions are closer to those of the US and China," the economist insisted. Under this calculation, the EU emits 16% of the global total, compared to 21% for both China and the United States.

I find no better way to close this note with some words written by Naomi Klein, in her emblematic book “This changes everything”. “Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings. The cuts to our greenhouse gas emissions that scientists tell us are necessary in order to greatly reduce the risk of catastrophe are treated as nothing more than gentle suggestions, actions that can be put off pretty much indefinitely. Clearly, what gets declared a crisis is an expression of power and priorities as much as hard facts. But we need not be spectators in all this: politicians aren’t the only ones with the power to declare a crisis. Mass movements of regular people can declare one too…I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale. As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels many scientists recommend, we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up. But before any of these changes can happen – before we can believe that climate change can change us – we first have to stop looking away”

Hurricane Patricia and Future Trend #6: Climate Change

Hurricane Patricia headed toward southwestern Mexico yesterday, as a monster Category 5 storm, the strongest ever in the Western Hemisphere that forecasters said could make a "potentially catastrophic landfall" later in the day, according the latest reports.   The hurricane is expected to bring accumulated rains ranging from 6 to 12 inches which could easily produce "life-threatening flash floods, mud slides (especially in areas of mountainous terrain), and high winds up to 130 m.p.h.," NOAA warns.

Well, this hurricane is one more extreme wether phenomenon and there are a lot of great research papers for the relation between climate change and extreme weather phenomena (this is one I like a lot by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute). And as much as we are preparing our cities to adapt themselves in the new emerging climate patterns, as much we should realise that waste management and recycling patterns will be certainly affected a lot by the climate change policies and science. 

Obviously, a first influence regards the financial resources: already there are a lot of funds available for waste management activities related to GHGs reduction (have a look at Climate Funds Update for more).

Another, also obvious trend regards the global cooperation required for fighting climate change - it seems that we are on the way for a new agreement in Paris. Countries have agreed that they would adopt a new climate agreement in 2015 at the Paris Climate Conference this December. The Paris 2015 Conference needs to result in the adoption of an international agreement, setting the framework for a transition towards resilient, low-carbon societies and economies. The Conference has the potential to mark a decisive step forward in the negotiation of the future international agreement that will enter into force in 2020,  with the aim that all countries, including the greatest greenhouse gas emitters – both developed and developing countries – should be bound for the first time by a universal climate agreement. 

In case this global agreement is achieved, then there will be a lot of new instruments to motivate GHGs reduction and certainly waste management sector will benefit of them. As an idea of the actual expectations and intentions of the recycling and waste management industry, the recent ISWA's Declaration on Climate Change and Waste Management provides a brief but thoughtful overview. 

But there are further, not so obvious impacts. 

Globalisation of environmental impacts: GHGs and marine litter are the most obvious ways to highlight that local SWM has a global environmental footprint. Under the current conditions and the global political agenda about Climate Change, the link between SWM and GHGs is the most important tool to create a universal understanding for how our local decisions in SWM contribute to global phenomena.

GHGs and the sense of time: human beings tend to underestimate or even ignore the importance of events that are out of their natural time scale. GHGs impacts are also a very good example in order to prove how previous and current SWM practices create Long Term results which substantially deteriorate the life of future generations.

GHGs and developing countries: I think that the global agenda for GHGs provides a unique opportunity to rethink the way international aid or Official Development Assistance (ODA) is distributed - there are many problematic situations at this field and the most important ones are two. A. the overall amount of ODA related to waste management is ridiculously small (less than 0.3% of the overall ODA) and, B. the poorest countries receive much less support than the developing to developed ones. This has been proven by a report that was made within the framework of the "Globalisation and waste management" project that was implemented by ISWA - for more check "A review of international development cooperation in Solid Waste Management".  If we are going to fight seriously the Climate Change, if we are going to prepare substantial adaptation and mitigation plans, then certainly we need to change completely the way ODA is managed. 

And last but not least is the challenge of adaptation, which is certainly underestimated when we speak about waste management. I have written again about it, but unfortunately nothing has changed. It seems that the most vulnerable waste management systems are the ones that happened to be in growing and transition megacities, where informal sector plays a certain role in waste management and infrastructure either is not in place or it is not adequate. In those urban areas, the environmental and health risks from a potential disaster related to waste management are really high and under certain conditions they might be proven more than local ones. Take into account that dumpsites, which are the dominant practice in those cases, are usually located at low levels and excavated with no plan and hydraulic protection and you will understand that this is a serious problem. 

ORBIT Conference 2012: Global assessment for organic resources and waste management

 

This is a contibution by Anne Trémier, a colleague I met during the Summer School on Biological and Thermal Treatment of Municipal Solid Waste, in Napoli, Italy, 2-6 May 2011 (see http://www.iat.unina.it/summerschool/home.html). Anne is a researcher at IRSTEA (see http://www.irstea.fr/en/home-page ) and one of the organizers of the upcoming ORBIT 2012 Conference which is dedicated to "Global assessment for organic resources and waste management: Assessment of technologies for optimal organics management processes and enlightened environmental policies". 

I am sure it will be one more succesful ORBIT conference and I will be there to join ORBIT's efforts. Here is what Anne wrote:

"During the last years, a big strength has been put on organic resources recovery in order to achieve our aspiration towards a "Recycling Society" and climate stabilisation. Energy, nutrients and organic matter needs have thus driven sustainable management of resources and wastes and promoted new technological developments. In this context, biological processing of organic wastes and the use of natural resources to recover nutrients as phosphorus, to produce soil improvers and to supply energy is of great interest. 

However rules on the management of organic resources waste are fragmented and the current legislation in Europe might be not sufficient to achieve the stated objectives of its effective management. Moreover there is an open question on the tools that can be used to assess the efficiency of organic resources and waste management systems and lead to the adequate processes selection. Especially the increasing use of Life Cycle Assessment tools has to be carefully addressed with a special focus on the considered indicators and the local applicability of the results.

Following the ORBIT conferences tradition, ORBIT2012 will deal with all aspects of organic resources and waste management with a special focus on the assessment of technologies with environmental, social and economical point of view. A large place will be given to climate change, waste management assessment and decision tools. Traditional themes as energy recovery (Biofuels, biogas, hydrogen production), biological treatments (composting and anaerobic digestion) and also mechanical biological treatment still remain central issues that have to be discussed in order to improve technologies and product quality, especially for land application. 

More local management systems such as home and community composting will also be discussed as they may represent solutions that have to be considered in an integrated organic waste management plan. Special emphasis will also be laid on EU policies and strategies for sustainable organic waste management. The conference will present high quality and innovative research in all the aforementioned topics and will include oral presentations (about 180), poster presentations (about 50) and a specific workshop: “From Waste to Product – Sustainable Management of Organic Resources in Europe » .

We will be pleased to welcome you to the next ORBIT in June 12^th – 15^th 2012 in Rennes, France ( www.orbit2012.fr )". 

Jet fuels derived from waste resources: a new alternative!

This is an interview with my colleague and good friend Jeff Cooper, ISWA's president. I know Jeff for many years and I always like his scientific approach to resources and waste management as well as his broad understanding of the different waste management aspects.

His involvement in a project where waste resources are going to be trasnformed to jet fuel really triggered me  and I thought that interviewing him about that project would make us certainly wiser. So here comes his interview, I hope you will enjoy it as I did.

 Jeff, I think you are the only one I know involved in airplane biofuel production utilizing waste resources. It sounds exciting and I would like you to give us an idea about it. Let us know about the project you already work on.

Antonis, you are right, in that there very few people from the waste sector dealing with the issue of the development of jet fuel from residual waste sources, ie after the most immediately recyclable items in the municipal, and the C&I waste streams have been extracted.

In 2009 after two years of preliminary discussions the USA-based company Solena Group/Solena Fuels offered to join forces with British Airways (BA) in order to evaluate the possibility of developing a plant to produce liquid bio-jet fuels for BA from a range of feedstock sources ( www.solenagroup.com ).

The plant to be developed in Tilbury, Essex is a 500-560,000 tpa biomass processing facility – ideally using high carbon materials - in order to convert them into liquid bio-jet fuel. This would allow BA to substitute a small proportion of its fossil fuels used for its aircraft with a renewable and more sustainable energy source.

The plant proposed would use a combination of new technology, a plasma arc gasification unit and an old established chemical processing system, the Fischer-Tropsch process.  The syngas (synthetic gas), or Bio-SynGas in this case, generated by the plasma arc would be converted to a liquid fuel.  A further advantage of this bio-jet fuel is that it has better combustion properties and lower pollution potential than its fossil fuel alternative when it is used in jet engines.

The plasma arc system has been proposed for several years as a potential alternative energy recovery option for waste processing.  Until recently with lack of support and limited success its development and use has not been regarded as viable.  As with other alternative systems, such as several microwave, sterilisation and autoclave-based plants developed in the UK and overseas, there has been huge scepticism, especially regarding the energy balance of the whole process. 

The main question for the plasma arc process was, could the total input of energy to reach the high temperatures required by a plasma arc, around 4,000-5,000oC, be generated internally by processing waste, let alone generate a surplus of energy?  If a surplus were to be generated could it be used as heat, electricity or, in the case of the Solena/BA project, manufacture a liquid bio-jet fuel? 

The advantage of plasma technology over more conventional gasification technologies is that 20-50% more of the carbon-based waste materials are broken down to ensure gasification of even the most intransigent carbon components. The gasification process releases a range of gaseous products but mainly carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

The Fischer-Tropsch process on the other hand is a long-standing technology originally developed by two German scientists in the 1920s.  Subsequently this process was used by the Germans during WWII to convert some of their coal resources to liquid fuels. The technology was further developed by SASOL, the South African energy company, which ensured that South Africa could utilise its vast soft coal resources for conversion to liquid fuels to withstand international oil embargoes in the 1970s and 1980s.   Even now the SASOL plant is in full production and produces jet fuel that is used by aircraft at Johannesburg airport.

In 2009 Solena started construction of their first commercial scale bio-fuel plant for liquid bio-fuel at Gilroy, California.  This plant is similar in size but the technology is different to the plant being proposed for the UK.  No plasma technology is involved and the fuel generated will be utilised by road vehicles.

The advantage of the Solena plasma arc process is that it uses a metallic catalyst in order to spread the heat impact of the plasma arcs used in the gasification units to a greater processing area and thus convert more of the carbon based wastes to gases.  Solena claims that only 5% of the energy content of the waste is required to gasify the waste in its latest processing system, thus leaving the energy surplus for a wide range of processes.  The types of feedstock which can be processed can include a wide range of wastes left after initial recycling of municipal, commercial and industrial waste streams, such as contaminated paper and plastics, multi-layered and other plastics which cannot be recycled, tyre chips, food waste, crop and forestry residues. 

The proposed Solena plasma arc system provides several productive outputs from the process: heat, electricity as well as the syngas, which can then be utilised to produce a liquid bio-fuel source.  The 500,000 tpa plant can provide sufficient energy to process waste into renewable liquid bio-fuel energy resources but also yields 20MW of electrical power, in addition to that required to operate the plant, plus surplus heat energy that could be used for industrial process heat or perhaps district heating. 

At full production the process should yield 1170 barrels a day of BioJetFuel and 630 blls day of bio-naphtha, which can also be used as a constituent of liquid fuel or as a chemical source.   Even the small amounts of final residue from the process can be readily utilised as a construction product because the high temperature used in the plasma arc system yields an inert glass-like solid material, which also has the advantage of locking in within the vitrified matrix any non-organic contaminants in the waste. 

For BA this project provides a substantial opportunity to reduce its carbon footprint.  Fuel usage generates 99% of its carbon footprint, a total of 17,583.853 tonnes CO2eq in 2008 from all BA’s operations, and therefore its main environmental impact. Unless BA were to address the future sources of its fuel consumption then anything else would be largely irrelevant. 

What is the concept behind it? I mean why British Airways is interested to invest in such a project and from the other side, why such a project is important for the waste management industry?

For BA (British Airways) – now part of the International Airlines Group (AIG) they needed to show positive support for to the IATA commitment to have 50% of renewable fuel sources for the airline sector by 2050.  At Board level therefore BA has therefore guaranteed to ensure that they will purchase the fuel for a lengthy period into the future for a minimum price.  This is something that the US military have not done despite President Obama’s commitment to the same target for their fuels but within a shorter timescale of 2015, “we’ve always worked on annual contracts and will continue to do so”.

For the waste management industry worldwide this project demonstrates that there is a further option within the portfolio of products that we can be producing in the future – we already have various EfW options but this is a product stream which has little other alternative except in specialist short/medium haul applications.    

Speaking about the technologies, I wonder if we are speaking for proven and commercial technologies? I would also like to know what types of waste are suitable and if such a technological approach could provide solutions in a city scale?

 The plasma arc system has been proposed for several years as a potential alternative energy recovery option for waste processing.  Until recently, with lack of support and limited success its development and use has not been regarded as viable.  As with other alternative systems, such as several microwave, sterilisation and autoclave-based plants developed in the UK and overseas, there has been huge scepticism, especially regarding the energy balance of the whole process. 

The main question for the plasma arc process was, could the total input of energy to reach the high temperatures required by a plasma arc, around 4,000-5,000oC, be generated internally by processing waste, let alone generate a surplus of energy?  If a surplus were to be generated could it be used as heat, electricity or, in the case of the Solena/BA project, manufacture a liquid bio-jet fuel? 

The advantage of plasma technology over more conventional gasification technologies is that 20-50% more of the carbon-based waste materials are broken down to ensure gasification of even the most intransigent carbon components. The gasification process releases a range of gaseous products but mainly carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

The Fischer-Tropsch process on the other hand is a long-standing technology originally developed by two German scientists in the 1920s.  Subsequently this process was used by the Germans during WWII to convert some of their coal resources to liquid fuels. The technology was further developed by SASOL, the South African energy company, which ensured that South Africa could utilise its vast soft coal resources for conversion to liquid fuels to withstand international oil embargoes in the 1970s and 1980s.   Even now the SASOL plant is in full production and produces jet fuel that is used by aircraft at Johannesburg airport.

According your knowledge, when it will be the date when such a solution will become really available? And give us an idea for its costs, related to other options.

This is a difficult question but we envisage the GreenSky project, as the British project is now called, being fully operational in 2015. 

As for the costs again it is difficult because each country will have its own constraints and incentives.  In the UK we have a landfill tax that is currently £56 per tonne but from April this year will be £64 per tonne so the provision of even well processed residual waste should cost the plant nothing – a gate fee would be negotiated against a quality specification from the suppliers as they will be saving huge amounts of money through diverting waste from landfill.  Nevertheless, if there are suitably large quantities of residual waste available the opportunity to establish a bio-jet fuel facility becomes increasingly attractive.    

 Last but not least, I would like to have your personal opinion regarding the future of waste to energy technologies. Can we hope to pyrolysis and gasification or their commercial application is too far? Biofuel production is an alternative or a supplementary solution? And how about H2 production from waste?

My personal opinion I’ve expressed in answer to Q1&2 but I’ve been looking at the whole range of new technologies over the past few years of my 30-year career in waste management.  I am a resource scientist by training and the shift to increasing resource cost extraction of both renewable and non-renewable resources occurred about 12-14 years ago compared to a reducing trend before that, as I’d always proposed when dealing with the issues of resource economics in the 1970s as an academic.  Before that time technological and other developments could provide resources at increasingly lower resource (and possibly environmental) cost.  Now we need more resources into order to extract resources and therefore we are in a spiral of decline which makes the financial crisis look like a party.  However, the two are inextricably linked – but perhaps that is outside the scope of this feature.

As for H2 production and use, this would be possible and indeed is often suggested for a variety of applications, particularly: for storage of the energy, use in fuel cells and within the road transport sector.  I would support these opportunities being exploited but we are looking for a specific liquid fuel substitute for the current kerosene jet fuel used for the past 60 years. However we provide it in the future, the conventional mechanism of distillation from fossil oil extracted from under the earth will decline in the future.