The Thunder Mountain concept has a booming history!

Review Process Underway at WV-DEP, Air Quality Division until July 27, 2023

Appreciation goes to the Staff of the WV-DEP for the open question and public comment sessions July 20th on the proposed Medical Waste gasifier/incinerator to be sited in Jackson County. As all the questions indicated, this proposal is hardly understood at all! Most important were the questions and comments of Mr. Buckley from Jackson County. The residents there not only lack understanding, they are not even aware!

A schematic diagram or flow sheet was promised to Mr. Buckley, which I also ask about during the question session. I also stated that the Application Document for this project that is on the WV-DEP website was 1974 pages in size when I tried to use it. (It apparently has been growing in size as time passes.) This document is too large. I was unable to fully load or navigate in it beyond page 38.

1. Please decompose the Application Document and designate one component (separate document) as The Application Document. Then, the other supporting documents or separate appendices will be supplements. Please forward these ASAP to the participants and any others that may be considered party to this matter.

2. Please obtain or prepare a reasonable process flow sheet showing some technical detail and email these to Mr. Buckley, Mr. Nichols (this writer), and the other participants. Be sure to indicate the By-Pass feature, its input and exit. And, indicate the continuous emission monitoring (CEM) locations and flare locations, if any.

3. Please consider holding a Public Event in Jackson County in mid-September on this Application. The hot months of the vacation season are to be avoided. The local residents there deserve to become informed of this proposed 20 ton per day facility involving unusually noxious materials. Such a Public Meeting was held in Follansbee, WV, regarding a similar size waste incinerator. (Have you estimated the TPD of GHG?)

4. Additional justification for the above requests is the unusually complex if not complicated nature of the process, of the control system and of the draft Air Quality Permit itself. Most commentors noted this as well as the complex data stream that will result. Generally, it was noted that the draft Permit is far too lenient in its time periods and deadlines, given the toxic substances that can escape to the local environment. Providing the operators 15 days to fix any specific leak, is just one example.

>> Submitted to WV-DEP, July 21, 2023, Duane Nichols, Nichols330@gmail.com

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YOUTUBE VIDEO AVAILABLE: VIRTUAL PUBLIC HEARING ON AIR QUALITY PERMIT FOR THUNDER MOUNTAIN GASIFIER SYSTEM, WV-DEP, JULY 20, 2023

https://youtu.be/ULSaBZoo3rg

Plastic Pollution Crisis from “beyondplastic.org”

Article by Randi Pokladnik, Ph.D. (Environmental Scientist), 10/12/22

As consumers become increasingly aware of the health risks and environmental issues associated with a world drowning in plastics, the petrochemical industry is advocating another false solution to address the plastic crisis facing the planet: advanced recycling or chemical recycling.

Chemical recycling uses incineration processes including pyrolysis, gasification, and solvolysis to break down plastic waste. The industry claims this will make plastic production “circular” by using plastic to make more plastic and keeping hard-to-recycle plastic waste out of landfills. A 2019 study by the U.S. Department of Energy estimated the US discarded 44 million metric tons of plastic, and 86 percent of this plastic ended up in landfills.

The PR departments of the plastics industry and the American Chemical Council are working overtime to convince politicians and citizens that chemical recycling is the answer to the enormous problem of plastic wastes. However, like carbon capture and “blue hydrogen”, this process is just another way to greenwash an industry that is responsible for 400 million tons of plastic waste each year. From cradle to grave, the entire process of plastic production has a significant carbon footprint. Even the United Nations has declared plastic wastes as a serious threat to humanity and the planet.

By using the term “recycling” the industry is misleading consumers and decision-makers. Recycling means ‘”to return a material to a previous stage of a cyclic process.” If the waste plastic material was indeed turned back into a similar plastic, it would provide a benefit to the environment by reducing the need for fossil-fuel-based feedstock to create virgin plastic. But this is not the case with chemical recycling where the majority of plastic wastes are being converted and used as a fuel source.

The technology of chemical recycling can be grouped into two main categories: heat-based and solvent- based. There are two primary methods that use heat and pressure to break down the long chain plastic polymers: pyrolysis and gasification. Both apply high temperatures to the waste plastic in a low oxygen setting or an oxygen-depleted reactor. Solvent-based depolymerization is a bit more complicated as it relies on heat as well but also includes various steps and solvents to break bonds, to strip out impurities, or to retain in-tact polymers.

A study released in September 2022, shows that reuse and mechanical recycling of plastic packaging are both better choices when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Emissions from mechanical recycling are lower than those from chemical recycling by a factor of 9.” The study also points out that reducing the amounts of unnecessary packaging will also help move the world towards a zero-emission economy.

Other factors to consider, aside from the fact that the majority of facilities are not truly recycling any plastic, are the large quantities of hazardous waste generated, the amounts of toxic air pollutants released, and the fact that facilities are “disproportionately located in communities of low income or people of color, or both.”

Agilyx, located in Tigard, Oregon is one of the few commercial-scale facilities in operation. It uses pyrolysis to turn polystyrene into the monomer styrene, which is used to make more polystyrene. Much of the styrene however is used as a fuel source. The plant released 500,000 pounds of hazardous waste in 2019. Styrene is made from benzene, a known carcinogen. PureCycle located in Ohio is also a large-scale hazardous waste producer with more than 2200 pounds of hazardous waste generated per month.

Chemical recycling requires a considerable amount of energy and obtains this by burning fossil fuels, thus adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. “In 2019 alone, the global production and incineration of plastic accounted for more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere, approximately equal to the emissions from 189 five-hundred megawatt coal power plants.”

Additionally, when plastic is burned, the carbon portion of the polymer is combusted but other toxic additives used in plastic production remain in the residue. If the plastic is used for fuels or chemical feedstocks, the non-combustible materials will remain intact. These toxins can be carcinogenic or endocrine disruptors and include: dioxins, furans, heavy metals, flame retardants, PAHs, VOCs, phthalates, bisphenol A, chlorine and fluorine. The “EPA provides little information about emissions and relies heavily on self-reporting by the industry.”

The American Chemistry Council has promoted chemical recycling and is “actively trying to influence state and local governments and decision-makers to approve new plastic expansion projects, remove regulatory obstacles, and award public monies or tax breaks to pass some of the needed investment on to taxpayers.” The ACC and other trade associations support bills which would allocate money (HR 5115) for recycling infrastructure including chemical recycling as well as funding dollars for research (HR 7728) on the technology.

A 2020 Greenpeace report “Deception by the Numbers” looked at financial investments for 51 chemical recycling projects. They found since 2017, $506 million had been awarded via public funds such as bonds, loans, grants, tax credits and other incentives. Of that $506 million, “89 percent was spent on waste-to-fuel/plastic-to-fuel.” Taxpayers are not paying for plastic recycling but rather paying for fuels for the petrochemical industry.

One of the major sticking points when it comes to regulations is the classification of chemical recycling. It is being defined as a manufacturing process rather than a waste incineration process. This means facilities are subject to less stringent air and water quality requirements. Currently, there are twenty signed state laws, including HB 166 in Ohio and SB 4084 in West Virginia, that redefine waste to exclude “advanced/chemical recycling”. One of the few states to kill an industry-backed bill was Rhode Island. A June 27, 2022 issue of “Plastic News” reported that two senior Democrats had “significant questions about the bill.” Environmental groups in the state argued that the state should focus on reducing single use plastics. The Conservation Law Foundation said “there was no evidence to support the claim that new plastics were being made, and instead materials were being burned creating climate-changing gases and air pollution.”

A final concern with these dangerous facilities is where they are located. In most cases, poor communities of color seem to be the sites for the majority of waste to energy plants. You will not see a chemical recycling facility in a rich suburb. Many lawmakers admit this is clearly a case of environmental injustice. They are writing and passing laws hoping to address the disproportionate amounts of hazardous facilities, like chemical recycling, located in poor communities, near schools, close to water sources, and adjacent to parks and public lands. (Rhode Island HB 5923).

SOBE Thermal Energy Systems is proposing a “recycling facility for tires and plastics” in Youngstown, Ohio. Basically, they will be using gasification to create a fuel that will be burned to create steam to heat some downtown buildings.

When the CEO of SOBE, Dave Ferro, was questioned about this facility his reply was, “his plant would be as clean or cleaner than natural gas.” Any peer reviewed analysis of the incineration of plastics/tires will point out the toxic air pollutants created in the process (dioxin and furans) as well as all the plastic additives that will not be fully destroyed. This facility will subject the community to a constant stream of toxins in their air, land and water. I urge anyone who thinks this is a good idea to do the research, read the scientific studies. Do not buy into industry claims that this is recycling. It is simply a dirty waste-to-energy project.

The president of plastics at Brightmark stands amid 900 tons of waste plastic in Indiana. Their purpose is to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel, naphtha and wax.

From an Article by James Bruggers, Inside Climate News, September 11, 2022

ASHLEY, Indiana—The bales, bundles and bins of plastic waste are stacked 10 feet high in a shiny new warehouse that rises from a grassy field near a town known for its bright yellow smiley-face water tower.

Jay Schabel exudes the same happy optimism. He’s president of the plastics division of Brightmark Energy, a San Francisco-based company vying to be on the leading edge of a yet-to-be-proven new industry—chemical recycling of plastic.

Walking in the warehouse among 900 tons of a mix of crushed plastic waste in late July, Schabel talked about how he has worked 14 years to get to this point: Bringing experimental technology to the precipice of what he anticipates will be a global, commercial success. He hopes it will also take a bite out of the plastic waste that’s choking the planet.

“When I saw the technology, I said this is the sort of thing I can get out of bed and work on to change the world,” said Schabel, an electrical engineer. “My job is to set it up and get it running,” he said of the $260 million, 120,000 square foot building and adjacent chemical operations. “Then perpetuate it around the world.”

But the company, which broke ground in Ashley in 2019, has struggled to get the plant operating on a commercial basis, where as many as 80 employees would process 100,000 tons of plastic waste each year in a round-the-clock operation.

Schabel said that was to change in August, with its first planned commercial shipment of fuel to its main customer, global energy giant BP. But a company spokesman said in mid-August that the date for the first commercial shipment had been pushed back to September, with “full-scale operation…extending through the end of the year and into 2023.”

Even with that new timetable, the plant, located along Interstate 69 in the northeast corner of Indiana, Brightmark faces ongoing economic, political and — environmental critics and some scientists say — technical headwinds. Its business model must contend with plastics that were never designed to be recycled. U.S. recycling policies are dysfunctional, and most plastics end up in landfills and incinerators, or on streets and waterways as litter.

Environmental organizations with their powerful allies in Congress are fighting against chemical recycling and the technology found in this plant, known as pyrolysis, in particular, because they see it as the perpetuation of climate-damaging fossil fuels. “The problem with pyrolysis is we should not be producing more fossil fuels,” said Judith Enck, a former regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the founder and executive director of Beyond Plastics, an environmental group. “We need to be going in the opposite direction. Using plastic waste as a feedstock for fossil fuels is doubling the damage to the environment because there are very negative environmental impacts from the production, disposal and use of plastics.”

The global plastics crisis is well documented with annual plastic production soaring from 20 million metric tons to 400 million metric tons over the last five decades. Nearly all are made from fossil fuels and much is designed to resist biodegradation and can last in the environment for hundreds of years, increasingly as microscopic bits that are ubiquitous and have invaded the human body.

The amount of plastic discharged into the ocean could reach up to 53 million metric tons per year by 2030, or roughly half of the total weight of fish caught from the ocean annually, according to a December report by a committee of scientists with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

The U.S. produces the most plastic waste in the world, nearly 300 pounds per person in a year, the report found. But only a small percentage, less than 6 percent, of plastics used by consumers in the U.S. actually get recycled, a recent analysis of EPA data by Beyond Plastics and the Last Beach Cleanup found.

What does get recycled, such as soda bottles, typically goes through a mechanical process involving sorting, grinding, cleaning, melting and remolding, often into other products. But there are limits to the kinds of plastics that are acceptable for mechanical recycling and how many times these plastics can be re-used in this way.

Chemical recycling, called advanced recycling by the chemical industry— which touts it as almost a Holy Grail of solutions—seeks to turn the harder-to-recycle kinds of plastic waste back into plastics’ basic chemical building blocks. Pyrolysis is among the chemical recycling technologies getting the most attention, with industry representatives saying pyrolysis can turn mixtures of plastic waste into new plastic, fuel or chemicals for making everything from detergents to cars to clothing.

With these plastic wastes, such as grocery bags, cups, lids, containers and films, the industry claims, pyrolysis heats them at high temperatures in a vessel, with little or no oxygen and sometimes with a chemical catalyst, to create synthetic gases, a synthetic fuel called pyrolysis oil, and a carbon char waste product. It’s a process that’s been around for centuries, used for making tar from timber for wooden ships in the 1600s, for example, or coke from coal for steelmaking in the last century.

Brightmark describes its plant as the “largest-scale pyrolysis facility in the world.” It is designed to take plastic waste hauled in from municipal and industrial sources. The waste is cleaned, chopped up and pressed into small pellets, then fed into pyrolysis tanks and heated by burning natural gas. The synthetic gas created by the pyrolysis process is then mixed with the natural gas to generate temperatures between 800 degrees and 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, Schabel said.

“We flush the molecules out and condense them,” Schabel said, describing what the high heat does to the plastic waste. “We are hitting them with a thermal hammer to break them into pieces. They want to come back together but we control how they come back together.”

The char is sent to a landfill as non-hazardous waste, he said, and the pyrolysis oil goes to a small-scale refinery behind the warehouse, where it’s separated into low-sulfur diesel fuel, flammable liquid naphtha, and wax for industrial uses or candles. “We call this a hyper-local oil well,” Schabel said on the tour. But a lot of what comes into the plant gets lost in the process.

In a document Brightmark filed in December with the EPA, the company acknowledged that just 20 percent of the plant’s output is its primary product — what it described as fuels. Most of the rest, 70 percent, is the synthetic gas that the company said is combusted with natural gas to generate heat, with 20 percent of that syngas burned away in a flare. The rest is the char, according to the filing.

The company now disputes its own numbers, with a spokeswoman saying company officials are working to get them corrected to reflect a larger percentage of output as diesel fuel or naphtha. But the EPA filing plays into one of the sharpest criticisms of pyrolysis — that it’s not really plastics recycling at all.

With pyrolysis, “what you make is what I would call, and I grew up in New Jersey, so forgive me, a dog’s breakfast of compounds,” said University of Pittsburgh Professor Eric Beckman, a chemical engineer with a Ph.D. in polymer science. “It’s like everything you can think of, gases, liquids, solids,” he said.

If plastic waste could be turned only into naphtha, a bonafide building block for plastics, a company could operate what Beckman called a closed loop, and circular system for plastics that could be considered recycling, he said. But that is not what pyrolysis does.

“And this is where it gets controversial,” Beckman said, adding: “because you have people doing this who are saying, ‘We’re recycling it.’ No, you’re not. You’re burning it.” And any time that fossil fuels are being burned, he said, they are emitting greenhouse gas and air pollutants.

Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who has worked as a consultant to the oil and gas industry and now runs The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit that fights plastic waste, agreed. “The fact that pyrolysis operations have to burn so much of the material to get to the high temperatures is a fundamental flaw,” she said.

>>> To be continued tomorrow …….

Plastic refuse is accumulating at an alarming rate

From an Article by Jared Paben, Resource Recycling, October 21, 2020

Three virgin plastics companies recently announced developments in the area of chemical recycling. The following are summaries of the news from Chevron Phillips Chemical, SABIC and BASF.

Commercial-scale milestone: Chevron Phillips Chemical announced that it successfully completed its first U.S. commercial-scale production of polyethylene (PE) derived from chemically recycled mixed plastics.

“We are exceptionally proud to be the first company to announce production of a circular polyethylene on this scale in the U.S.,” Jim Becker, vice president of polymers and sustainability for the company, stated in a press release. “The successful production run marks a huge step for CPChem on our path to being a world leader in producing circular polymers.”

The company is now looking to scale up the use of the pyrolysis technology, as well as achieve certification for the new PE through the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification Plus (ISCC Plus) mass-balance methodology. Upon certification, Chevron Phillips Chemical intends to market the plastic under the trade name Marlex Anew Circular Polyethylene.

Recycled-content tube: Three companies are collaborating to bring chemically recycled plastic into beauty product packaging. Virgin plastics producer SABIC will supply recycled resin derived from post-consumer mixed plastics, part of the company’s TRUCIRCLE portfolio of chemically recycled polyolefins. Albéa will convert the plastic into tubes for Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) products; specifically, the tubes will hold Origins skincare brand products. According to a press release, the package is expected to hit store shelves in 2021.

In August, SABIC announced that its TRUCIRCLE recycled polypropylene (PP), produced via a pyrolysis process, was being used in Magnum brand ice cream tubs. Over 7 million of the recycled-content tubs are slated to be rolled out across Europe this year.

From tires to recycled plastics: BASF’s ChemCycling project has focused on using a pyrolysis technology to process difficult-to-recycle mixed plastics into chemicals for use in new plastics. Now, BASF is supporting the use of pyrolysis on scrap tires.

The global chemical company plans to invest 16 million euros (nearly $19 million) in Pyrum Innovations, a German company using pyrolysis on scrap tires. BASF plans to use the resulting pyrolysis oil to produce recycled-content plastic products for customers, alongside its existing recycled-content offerings derived from scrap plastics.

“With the investment, we have taken another significant step towards establishing a broad supply base for pyrolysis oil and towards offering our customers products based on chemically recycled plastic waste on a commercial scale,” Hartwig Michels, president of BASF’s Petrochemicals division, stated in a press release.

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New plastic pyrolysis capacity planned in the United States

From an Article by Craig Bettenhausen, Chemical & Engineering News, Vol 98, Issue 27, July 10, 2020

Plants by Braven Environmental and Encina May take in a combined 225,000 metric tons of waste plastic per year

Two new plastic pyrolysis plants are in the works in the US that could add a new recycling option for plastic trash and increase the supply of some commodity chemicals.

In pyrolysis, a feedstock such as waste plastic is heated in a low-oxygen environment and, instead of burning, breaks down into a mix of simpler hydrocarbons. Tweaking the reaction conditions—such as temperature, pressure, or use of a catalyst—allows operators to get various product mixtures.

The pyrolysis firm Encina is finishing designs with engineers at Worley for a plant that will take in about 160,000 metric tons (t) of waste plastic per year and yield 90,000 t of BTX, a mixture of benzene, toluene, and xylenes normally produced from oil. The firms say the designs are modular, which will let them add capacity later. This will be Encina’s first plant, and founder David Schwedel says the company has four more in the planning stages globally.

Braven Environmental is planning a plant in central Virginia that will take in 65,000 t of plastic per year and produce 50 million L of a diesel-like hydrocarbon blend, according to Michael Moreno, the company’s chief operating officer. The $32 million plant will also produce syngas, which it will burn to fuel the process. The firm expects to create 52 permanent jobs at the site when it opens in mid-2021.

Environmental advocates debate the merits of pyrolysis, citing concerns about scalability, toxic by-products, and derailment of a transition away from single-use plastics. Promoters of such chemical recycling methods counter that they save energy and help keep plastics out of landfills and waterways.