Fresh off several conferences and meetings where discussions centered around smart grid, wind power, and other renewable energies, yesterdays tour of the Shanghai Municipal Waste Facility proved to be a very interesting site visit. Operational for 3 years now, this facility (one of two facilities in Shanghai) incinerates about 1500 tons of trash a day from 5 districts of Shangahi (Shanghai has a total of 19,000 tons of trash a day)
Built largely with foreign equipment, the facility has 3 boilers that provide the fuel to turn its 24MW turbines for a total of 1400000 kwH of energy, and the resulting fly ash is roughly around 20% by volume. Able to sell its energy to the grid for .5RMB/ kwh (a .09 RMB premium over coal) and able to generate a bit of a revenue fromremoving garbage out from the landfill, the facility is now turing a profit and on the way to paying back the original investment of .6 billion RMB.
While on the tour, it was clear to us that this facility was receiving special treatment, and that it was a case study that was being learned from. At one point, our host mentioned Shanghai’s goal of zero landfill waste by 2020, which means that more incinerators are going to be built.. althougth he only mentioned that Shanghai had only targeted 30% incineration.
Which leaves recycling, and biochemical solutions not currently in China.
One issue that I brought up was that if the incinerators were able to use the fly ash as part of their roadworks, then a real model for using waste streams would be built, and thus reducing the costs of several environmental issues that are faced by the waste and construction industry. The response I was given to the question was that in China this is not allowed, and that the European standards were not high enough… an area for improvement..
The news that Jiangxi is set to build its first garbage incineration power plant, comes as welcoming news as I spent last week driving by farmland on fire.
The Urban Appearance and Environmental Administration Bureau of Nanchang City recently signed an agreement with the Hong Kong-based Biomax Green Energy Group to build Jiangxi Province’s first domestic waste incineration power plant—the Nanchang Quanling Domestic Waste Incineration Power Plant—in Liangjiadu, Quanling Township, Jinxian County of Nanchang City.
It will be a BOT (build-operate-transfer) project with a scheduled construction period of 2 years and an operation period of 25 years. After the project is completed, it will be able to deal with a maximum of 1,200 tons of waste per day. With a maximum power generating capacity of 108.3 million kilowatt-hours per year, it will be able to provide 84.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity to power grids after deducting the power consumption required for the incineration process.
It is a common sight in China, burning garbage and rice husks, and it represents a huge opportunity to reduce pollution and provide energy to those off the grid:
When working with the issues of poverty alleviation, and those at the bottom of the pyramid, I am constantly amazed by how simple it is to make improvements through the use of existing technologies and a little money.
World Bank loans money to China for biogas project highlights one of those efforts:
The World Bank has announced that it will invest $120 million in China’s National Rural Biogas Program to use anaerobic digestion to process waste to produce biogas for cooking. The grant will help farmers in China’s Anhui, Hunan, Guangxi and Hubei provinces and Chongqing municipality residents improve their living conditions by using anaerobic digestion to process human, livestock, plant agricultural, and organic household waste to produce biogas for cooking.
And for those who are looking to accomplish this in a manner that does not further weigh down the carbon/ water/ energy footprint of humanity, this is one of those programs.
Not only are savings found in that the infrastructure to do this through more traditional means (connecting them to the grid) are avoided, but long term the improve health benefits of gas over wood will also reduce the long term costs that the local/ regional governments would spend on healthcare.
Wang Mengjie, Director of China Centre for Rural Energy Research and Training, in 2002 submitted the 4 page article Biogas Technology and Ecological Environment Development IN Rural Areas Of China (PDF Download Here) at the First International Conference on Ecological Sanitation
While not a technical paper, Wang gives some nice support for the use of biogas in China’s rural areas.
Included in this paper was one of the best illustrations of what a courtyard biogas system would look like (see above)
For China, algae blooms are an issue they have been dealing with for a long time. In the last 2 years, there has been international coverage of blooms in Wuxi (China’s 3rd largest lake) and Qingdao (right before the Olympics), but the problem is much larger and has a longer history.
When covering the issues last year, I began looking at biomass applications that would use algae, but everything I saw kept telling me that the algae that China is constantly fighting is not the same breed – of the right strain – as the type needed to create energy.
Two article this week may change that, and there may now be firms who are able to use the pond scum of China and turn it into something useful.
the first comes from Earth2Tech who are reporting PetroSun to Make Algae Fuel in China.
plans to establish an algae farm in China that will produce algae to be converted into biofuels. The company says it has an agreement with the Shanghai Jun Ya Yan Technology Development Co., which will commit $40 million to fund the initial construction of the farm. The profits of the venture will be split between PetroSun’s China subsidiary and Shanghai Jun Ya Yan Tech.
The next post, 15 Algae Startups Bringing Pond Scum to Fuel Tanks, is an older post from Earth2Tech that lists 15 different firms who are working on various common algae conversions
despite the fact that algae-to-biofuel startups have been taking their sweet time bringing a pond scum fuel product to market, some inroads have been made recently
Where this will get interesting, and perhaps exciting, is if firms are able to capture the algae blooms that China is normally producing and convert that into energy.
For most Westerners, not having 7000 pieces of dried yak dung around the house is not necessarily a bad thing, but in Tibet where a household may need to burn 7000 pieces to keep the house warm.. 7000 pieces is not enough.
The recent article Tibet moving on climate change threat highlights an issue that the region is facing as it preares for winter. It is short of biomass fuels for its people to stay warm – think of it as the equivalent to a gas shortage on the east coast of the US.
The result of rain and snow levels rising, this is forcing the hand of local officials who must now find a solution:
Nagqu prefecture deputy chief Gyaltsen Wangdrak has kept a close eye on the weather changes, accumulating data on how much damage the extreme weather fluctuations have caused to both the local economy and the herders over the past decade.
In 2003, Gyaltsen met Lin Erda, a senior researcher of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. They pooled together a 1.3 million yuan fund – with 800,000 yuan from Lin and 500,000 from the local Nagqu government – to study the long-term effects of global warming on Nagqu’s grasslands.
Over the course of 12 months, they mapped the degradation of grassland in Nagqu with remote sensing technology. The map showed that nearly half of Nagqu’s alpine grassland had degraded. The affected area covers about 20 million hectares, with 10 percent, or 4 million hectares, seriously degraded.
Based on this information, the prefecture started two experiments in Amdo county at the foot of Tanggula Mountain to restore seriously degraded grassland through sprinkler irrigation and reseeding. The goal is to quadruple the amount of grass from 600 kg to 2,400 kg per hectare.
it sounds an awful lot like the story of the Loess Plateau, and one can only hope that through the better management of the land, some of the negative consequences that have recently been felt can be reversed.
Developing biomass from cellulose has been a key step for many, and two Chinese scientists (one based in China and one in the US) have developed a way using tungsten carbide to split the cellulose into its sugar components so that those components can be fermented into biomass.
Where this research may yield benefits is (1) the current starch based ethanol process is not scalable to the size needed and (2) moving to a cellulose based biomass would relieve the existing inflationary pressure on food stocks.
The full article is here.