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$20 million biomass gasification facilility delivered to USC

Submitted by: John Warner on Oct 15, 2007 at 9:34 am Tagged with: Bioenergy, Biomass, Energy Source: Clean Break

Original at Clean Break

Biomass gasification as a way to produce clean-burning "syngas" offers a carbon-neutral approach to reducing our dependence on natural gas and fuel oil, whether to generate electricity or heat. It also makes it easier to isolate and capture the CO2 produced from the process, so if it eventually makes economic sense to capture and store the greenhouse gas the technology offers a carbon-negative approach to power and heat generation.

A Vancouver-based company called Nexterra Energy Corp. is making impressive inroads in the market, bolstered last week after it announced an alliance with Johnson Controls Inc. that will see the two companies aggressively pursue commercial projects for Nexterra's patented biomass gasification system. Already, Nexterra and Johnson Controls have delivered a $20-million system to the University of South Carolina that's expected to be operational sometime this fall. They hope to deploy similar systems to customers in education, healthcare, government, industrial (particularly forestry companies) and power generation markets.

In the area of power generation, Nexterra's technology can be combined with conventional steam turbine equipment to produce up to 10 megawatts of electricity. "These modular power plants represent a new standard in biomass power production as the systems are simpler in design, lower cost and cleaner than conventional wood biomass combustion power plants," the company states on its Web site. "This small scale gasification system allows for reliable and efficient electricity production while decreasing wood transportation costs and start-up time (12 to 14 months)."

This is ideal for markets like Ontario, where a standard offer program (offering a feed-in tariff of 11 cents per kilowatt hour on 10-MW or smaller wind, solar or biomass projects) makes such technology economically attractive. On that note, Nexterra Energy has partnered with a Calgary-based company called Pristine Power to help establish a network of modular gasification power plants throughout British Columbia. "The network will help B.C. forest companies and communities create more value from pine-beetle ravaged forest resources by generating up to 200 megawatts of clean, renewable energy using wood 'waste' as fuel."

Sources tell me that General Electric -- specifically, GE Jenbacher, the maker of low-cost, high-efficiency gas engines -- is in serious talks with Nexterra about using Jenbacher engines to further improve its gasification system. Currently the system to generate electricity works with steam turbines, but the hope in the next two or three years is to get it running reciprocating engines. This would reduce labour costs, partly because you don't need steam engineers on site. "It would be a breakthrough. There are a lot of people working on the issue. GE has an army of people working on it," said one consultant doing work for Nexterra. "The fact that GE right now has discovered them means the genie is out of the bottle. You're going to see them really grow."