A visit to Green Drinks of Syracuse

The event was at the hotel Skyler. The building was a former library turned hotel. It has a very nice new lounge and bar area with high prices to match. I decided to try to be ecological and drive my motorcycle there. In spite of the reasonably warm temperatures, most people were driving automobiles rather than cycles. There were a small group of chemistry students from ESF who were taking the opportunity to network. There were also some Green Drink regulars too.

One of the interesting conversations was with a person who sold industrial gassifiers. Now there is a person in a high-growth industry! This industry barely existed 10 years ago. The last time I looked at the industry in 2001, I could find only a few references to WWII gassifiers used in transport, an article in Mother Earth news about a truck mounted gassifier and only a few industrial scale gassifiers such as the electric power plant in Burlington VT. Since then, there has been a huge amount of progress. Even with the temporally low natural gas prices, there has a been some tremendous progress in this technology.

Gassifiers can be setup to use several different types of woody biomass fuel. The image on the right shows a layout for an electrical generation station. Small models are good at providing efficient heat and some have been modified to power vehicles. Industrial scale ones can efficiently provide electricity as was done in Burlington VT in the late 70's. A rather new development is that some industrial scale units have the ability to produce relatively pure syngas which can be processed into polymer products such as transport fuel that can stay liquid at remarkably low temperatures. Some demonstration plants show that it is possible to provide a non-gelling diesel fuel from woody biomass. The production price of this diesel equivalent might be as low as $10 a gallon. Very encouraging news!

For more on gassifiers (at least the older ones) visit HERE.