The industrial boiler market has been a good fit for the company. Local distribution has freed RES from high-distribution infrastructure costs. Additionally, boilers typically can accept less-refined fuels, giving the company more flexibility to refine its technology. The only downfall of marketing to fixed-engine markets is that the fuel sells for less than it would in the transportation market. To make up for the lower revenue, CWT produces a fertilizer coproduct from animal and agricultural waste that is registered for use in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma.

The TCP technology was first developed in CWT’s research and development, and engineering support facility in Philadelphia. The test facility was opened at its site in the Philadelphia Naval Yard in December 1999 and served as a pilot facility for the thermo-depolymerization process technology (later renamed thermal conversion process). Today, testing at this facility is focused on adapting the technology for new feedstocks, such as mixed agricultural wastes, municipal solid wastes, mixed plastics and tires. Specifically, it involves working with shredded residue waste, which is the plastic and rubber left over from shredded automobiles and appliances.

This mixed waste has a low value, and needs to be separated and prepared. “Those products are going to be a bit different than what you have from animal and agricultural waste,” Appel says, describing the challenges associated with this new feedstock. “You’re starting with different material and there’s a lot more material that doesn’t have the value of fertilizer.”

When processing municipal solid waste, the leftover material is metal, both ferrous (containing iron) and nonferrous, which go to local metal recyclers. These metals leave the process in the form of oxides, and Appel says they would pass leeching tests to calculate levels of groundwater contaminants. “Nothing is hitting an open flame, and nothing is really going to any extreme temperatures and pressures—nothing that could melt any metals,” Appel says. “The only solids that actually break down in the reactor at those temperatures are proteins.”

CWT hopes to complete the pilot work by this summer and proceed into design for a commercial demonstration facility that would process up to 200 tons per day. “We’re hoping to complete the design for the commercial demonstration plant by next summer and then have that plant operational two years from now,” Appel says.

He says the company is working with the county of Los Angeles to site a commercial demonstration facility there. “I would also suspect that there certainly would be interest in putting one in Michigan, due to the presence of the Vehicle Recycling Partnership, which has been cofunding us on the development of the technology for the application of the shredded residue,” Appel says. The Vehicle Recycling Partnership involves automobile manufacturers DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors, and is under the United States Council for Automotive Research. It conducts and funds research into recycling various automotive components.

CWT was founded in 1997 to determine a cost-effective way to eliminate waste, with energy production as the secondary goal. “Interestingly enough, the secondary became the primary,” Appel says, as the nation became increasingly focused on domestic energy production and decreasing carbon emissions. During this time, Appel says they’ve “learned an awful lot.”

“We still have work to do,” he says. “This was a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be because of all the different factors that come into play, but we’ve gotten over a lot of different hurdles.” One of the highest hurdles to overcome was that virtually everything about this process was new. Early on, adjustments had to be made to fuel delivery systems and other customer requirements. The company also found that it was difficult to train and hire personnel. “We didn’t have any analogous-type industry, where we could pull resources from,” Appel says. “The training had a lot longer lead time because this all was new.”

The biggest issue that the company still has to contend with is waste management. It takes a lot of material to create one barrel of oil. The company estimates that only 10 percent of agricultural waste can be fully converted to oil. With that in mind, the company requires very cheap feedstocks, a lot of storage space and a coproduct that is either valuable or can be disposed of affordably.

Additionally, Appel says the characterization of waste continually changes as recycling technologies and policies change what gets thrown away. “You get surges and spikes of these different shapes, sizes and density of materials, and it becomes an operational issue,” he notes. “We had to build in much more flexibility than we had envisioned.”

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