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I used to work in gasification, and my understanding is that Plasma gasification has not reached net positive. You use up about as much electricity producing t

I used to work in gasification, and my understanding is that Plasma gasification has not reached net positive. You use up about as much electricity producing the plasma as you gain from burning the syngas in a generator. Normal gasification on the other hand, which uses oxygen to do the pyrolysis is very much net positive. It's sad to me that this technology hasn't taken off, as you can produce a tremendous amount of electricity and hot water from waste streams such as agricultural waste, woody biomass and trash. Not to mention if you bury the biochar it is carbon negative.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Pyrolysis is one of those things that has a huge literature for very little commercial development, a lot like the liquid metal fast breeder reactor. It’s little remembered that people quit burning coal burning power plants in North America around the same time they quit building nuclear power plants for the same reason which is that it is very hard for a steam turbine to compete with a gas turbine. There is a huge literature on the possibility of gasifying coal and burning the gas in a turbine or maybe doing the same with biomass, maybe capturing the CO2. For that matter there are numerous pyrolysis projects aimed at converting plastics into liquid fuels, they usually are fought bitterly by environmentalists concerned about air quality and the fuel being carcinogenic, many of the plants have failed to stay in operation because they couldn’t figure out how to get them running reliably. Here is a list of mostly failed plasma projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification_commercialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification_commercial...
- 3abiton 3y ago
  It only takes one successful attempt, and it's worth it