Geoplasma, Plasma Reformation, and Nearly Perfect Recycling

So much for trash.  Plasma conversion is finally coming to the US, according to a story in USA Today.  Why is this worth noting?  Plasma conversion is as close toperfect recycling as we are going to get, at least for the time being.

I looked into this topic extensively a few years ago while working for a consulting firm.  One of our clients was a major auto manufacturer -- to remain nameless -- and I tried to convince the company that their future business model was not exclusively in producing autos, but rather, because of the complexity of introducing new technology and new fuels, in providing "transportation solutions", including hydrogen fuel.  They preferred to keep building petro-powered SUVs.  Perhaps it's time to reconsider that decision.

There's no magic in plasma conversion -- municipal garbage is obviously high in energy.  It is burned rather than stored in many locations.  But plasma reformation is much cleaner than simple incineration.  Trash goes in, and, depending on its composition and energy content, electricity, refined metals, and purified gases come out.  There's no snake oil here; the physics and chemistry work.  The only waste product from reformation consists of silicates, which so far can only be used for building roads and as abrasives for grinding wheels.  The volume of waste, including CO2,  is also much smaller compared to incineration since all the good stuff is reused.

As far as I can tell from the USA Today story, with its limited technical information and references to plasma conversion facilities up and running in Japan, Geoplasma is licensing technology from Startech Environmental Corp for a plant to be built in St. Lucie County, Florida.  Just guessing, though.  Presently, the Geoplasma website consists only of a long video clip that I didn't bother to watch.

(UPDATE - 22 Sept 06 :: Crinu Baila, a Senior VP at Geoplasma, wrote to tell me the following:

Westinghouse Plasma Corporation (WPC) plasma arc technology will be utilized in the Florida project.

WPC’s plasma arc units are reliable, rugged and have amassed close to 500,000 hours of operation in industrial environments.

In addition WPC has coupled the plasma arc units with a robust Plasma Gasification Vessel (PGV) that has the proven capability to process a wide variety of waste materials.

The combined plasma units/PGVs have been used in three commercial applications in Japan.

I don't know if the recycling capabilities I mention in this post are as easy with the WPC units as with the Startech plasma converters, but getting this technology into the market is progress, nonetheless.)

They economics of plasma conversion are compelling.  Getting rid of trash is expensive.  New York City spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million a year exporting its garbage, depending on how you count it up.  The combination of plasma conversion and hydrogen production is especially interesting if you consider the applications to distributed hydrogen production to fuel vehicles.  Here are tidbits from a report I wrote some years ago:

Hydrogen fuel cell powered automobiles are expected to enter production by 2010.  While engineering and production issues associated with the new technology will by definition be solved by the date of introduction, hydrogen fuel itself may not be easy to come by, perhaps limiting sales.  Development of a centralized hydrogen production and distribution capability analogous to today’s petroleum infrastructure would no doubt be extraordinarily expensive, but this investment may not be necessary.   Hydrogen locked up in municipal waste streams can be locally harvested in a distributed system for both stationary and automotive fuel cell use.

A Plasma Converter and gas purifier system from Startech Environmental can produce ~43 liters of hydrogen for each kilogram of municipal trash with a net surplus of energy.  New York City exports ~5.5 million kg (12,000 tons) of trash a day at an annual cost approaching $500 million dollars.  Three years worth of this export cost could be used to purchase sufficient plasma conversion infrastructure to fuel several hundred thousand cars per day from NYC’s trash.  Introduction of this technology could be aided by focusing on fleet operation such as taxicabs, police vehicles, buses, or the military.  Similar opportunities are present in other metropolitan areas, and markets, beyond NYC and will provide a short cut to providing hydrogen for fuel cell powered automobiles.

Yeah, yeah -- I know, switching over to the hydrogen economy is going to be expensive and take forever.  But not if you pick your battles:

There is a popular argument among detractors of hydrogen as a fuel that the expense of developing infrastructure for the hydrogen economy is prohibitive.  They insist that because hydrogen production and pumping stations will cost many billions of dollars to build, whatever the actual need, the realization of a hydrogen economy is far in the future.  So far in the future, so the argument goes, that we need not plan for such an eventuality at all.

The most significant error in this argument is its root premise, that a hydrogen economy is somehow foreign, unfamiliar, and ultimately too expensive.  Quite the contrary, we do not need to develop a hydrogen economy because we already have one.  The challenge is not to build a hydrogen infrastructure from scratch but to better harvest widely distributed energy and hydrogen that we now treat as waste.

A majority of industrial processes in the current economy work by shuttling hydrogen atoms amongst other molecules.  The most obvious of these processes is the burning of hydrocarbons, either for transportation or for the manufacture of other goods, where energy stored in the hydrocarbons is essentially transferred to the finished article or substance.  As a result, many manufactured products contain high energy chemical bonds, and many of those products are thrown out as whole objects.  The stored energy is thus also thrown away.  This trash is highly distributed and its conversion from valued good to waste is most concentrated near population centers.  Considerable further resources are then expended in transporting the waste elsewhere.

According to the New York City municipal budget, for example, the City spends ~$300 million per year to transport ~12,500 tons (5.7 million kg) of municipal waste a day to distant sites (this is in addition to the cost of local waste collection and transfer).  The City’s businesses generate an equivalent daily amount, which is collected by private companies.  This brings the total daily trash output of NYC to approximately 25,000 tons.  The City spends another ~$20 million a year for local “landfill monitoring and leachate control.”  The Economist estimates the total cost of exporting the City’s trash at closer to half a billion dollars a year.  There is clearly an economic opportunity if alternative disposal means can be found.

Even if you ignore the sale of recycled metals and gases, there is significant opportunity in providing fleet vehicles and hydrogen fuel for those vehicles;

“Plasma Conversion” is a process developed by Startech Environmental, of Wilton CT, in which plasma at 30,000° F is used to degrade waste, chemical weapons, etc.  The plasma provides an excess of electrons that chemically reduce complex compounds to their constituent elements.  In effect, a Plasma Converter runs backward the chemical reactions that produced the material in the waste.

Municipal waste is sufficiently energy dense to produce more chemical and electrical energy than is used to “convert” the waste.  Thus some of the recovered energy can be used to run the Plasma Converter.  More relevant for the purposes of this report, Startech has refined the process, with the aid of a ceramic filter, to produce ~7 ft3 of hydrogen gas at 99.999% purity from each pound of garbage (~43 L of hydrogen for each kg of trash).  The volume of trash produced by NYC public services could thus be processed to provide ~235 million L of hydrogen a day.  Adding the privately collected waste would double this amount.  Processing municipal waste from other metropolitan areas could reasonably be expected to produce hydrogen volumes in proportion to their population.

Startech is currently advertising units that process between 5 and 100 tons per day, which cost between $2.5 million and $12.5 million respectively.  Thus for the cost of 4 years worth of trash export fees, ~$1.3 billion, the infrastructure could be assembled to process all of New York City’s municipal trash into raw materials.  Pure hydrogen could be separated for use in fuel cells, and other materials sold to industry.  Trash is currently trucked from local pick-up points to several waste transfer stations.  Trash is then packed in sealed trucks for export.  The export step could be eliminated by locating plasma converters at waste transfer stations.  The one time infrastructure cost could be paid up front or amortized, and the operational costs would certainly be less than continuing trash export fees and would be offset by sales of hydrogen and raw materials.  A single technician can run a plasma converter, and with so many units in one place automation could enable one person to shepherd several units.

The utility of this recovered hydrogen can be estimated by calculating how many vehicles it can power.  The 2002 Hydrogen Fuel Cell powered Ford Focus test bed runs at ~100km/hr for approximately 400 km on 1244 L of hydrogen.  Assuming slightly larger average vehicles and consequent lower efficiency, a very conservative estimate is that the daily trash output of NYC could fuel more than 300,000 vehicles a day traveling several hundred kilometers each.  For example, all of the City’s taxicabs and Police cruisers could be run on each day’s supply of hydrogen produced from municipal trash.

If the numbers are so compelling, even just for arbitraging the inefficiency of exporting and caching trash, why isn't this technology popping up all over the U.S.,?  Back in 2003 or so, I had a chat with the CEO of Startech, and their biggest problem was investment in existing infrastructure.  That is, waste management companies, cities, and counties in the U.S., all h ave huge capital investments in garbage gathering, distribution, and disposal, and most of it has yet to be completely amortized.  In order to get into the market, you have to wait for the investment cycle to tick around to the point that equipment and facilities are being replaced.

So, in the end, a battle lost for me.  But only temporarily.  We'll all be mining garbage dumps relatively soon.

Bedroom Biology in The Economist

I have yet to see the print version, but evidently I make an appearance in tomorrow's Economist in a Special Report on Synthetic Biology.  (Thanks for the heads-up, Bill.)  I wasn't actually interviewed for the piece, but I've no objections to the text.  There is an accompanying piece that forecasts the coming "Bedroom Biotech", a phrase they seem to prefer to "Garage Biology".  Personally, I prefer to keep my DNA bashing to the garage rather than the bedroom.  Well, okay, most but not all of my DNA bashing.

The story contains a figure showing data from 2002 on productivity changes in DNA sequencing and synthesis, redrawn from my 2003 paper, "The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies", labeling them "Carlson Curves" once again.  Oh well.  The original paper was published in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism (PDF from TMSI, html version at Kurzweilai.net).  It isn't so much that I disavow the name "Carlson Curve" as I want to assert that quantitatively predicting the course of biological technologies is a questionable thing to do.  As Moore made clear in his paper, what became his law is driven by the financing of expensive chip fabs -- banks require a certain payment schedule before they will loan another billion dollars for a new fab -- whereas biology is cheap and progress is much more likely to be governed by basic science and the total number of people participating in the endeavor.

Newer versions of figures from the 2003 paper, as well as additional metrics of progress in biological technologies, will be available in December with the release of "Genome Synthesis & Design Futures: Implications for the US Economy", written with my colleagues at Bio Economic Research Associates (bio-era), and funded by bio-era and the Department of Energy.

To close the circle, I should explain that the "Carlson Curves" were an attempt to figure out how fast biology is changing, an effort prompted by an essay I wrote for the inaugural Shell/Economist Writing Prize, "The World in 2050."  (Here is a PDF of the original essay, which was published in 2001 as "Open Source Biology and its Impact on Industry.")  I received a silver prize, rather than gold, and was always slightly miffed that The Economist only published the first place essay, but I suppose I can't complain about the outcome. 

The Impact of Biofuel Production on Water Supplies

In an earlier post I mentioned briefly that I am concerned plans to grow crops for producing domestic biofuels do not adequately consider how much water this project will require.  I am all for domestic production of biofuels, and have a small project going to examine the possibilities.  But in my experience the people who have already launched businesses to this end, and the venture capitalists who funded them, all evince surprise at the notion water should be part of the engineering model for fuel production.

It seems I'm not the only one thinking along these lines, as Reuters today is reporting that, "biofuels could worsen water shortages".  The International Water Management Institute has just release a report that claims, "Conquering hunger and coping with an estimated 3 billion extra people by 2050 will result in an 80 percent increase in water use for agriculture on rainfed and irrigated lands."

The Western US is already stretched for water supplies; we mine aquifers for water faster that it can be replaced and declining yearly snow packs are producing drought conditions in cities accustomed to profligate summer water usage.  Some improvement could be made in the way we transport and use water, by switching to drip irrigation and lining canals and irrigation ditches to prevent leakage, for example.  But, given the yields from soy or canola, producing sufficient plant matter to replace any significant fraction of petroleum fuels with biofuels could easily require as much water as we already use to grow food crops.  I'm not nearly as bullish on algae for biodiesel now, although we might still figure out how to make it work.

I don't see any sign of the IWMI report online yet, and I quail at reading something compiled by 700 people.  But I will probably have a look when it is available.  This is exactly the sort of thing we have to figure out if we are to produce carbon neutral biofuels at scale.

Ah, Paris

I'm sitting in a pleasant cafe with free WiFi, eponymously at 28 Marbeuf, just off the Champs Elysees.  If you are nearby, it's a good place to pause and catch up on email.  It's supposed to be 34C here today, and the air conditioning in the cafe is especially nice.

On a different topic than usually appears in this space, I've a few thoughts about traveling with an infant in Europe:
1.  In both France and Germany, changing tables are everywhere, which is a nice improvement over the States.
2.  IMPORTANT :: Pampers here are not the same here as in the US.  The European sizes are smaller, and to avoid unpleasant poo explosions we had to buy diapers 2 sizes larger.
3.  As unpleasant poo explosions are inevitable with a 10 week old child, we've found a bottle of Spray and Wash to be exceptionally useful.
4.  Instead of trying to pack some sort of crib for the kid, we simply brought along a couple of foam triangles to keep her from rolling over and used blankets for padding on the floor.  The foam packs small and is light.  Way better than lugging more large stuff around.
5.  Gripe Water rocks.

We had a very nice week in Normandy, and I have a review of the Inn we stayed in Bayeux, Relais Des Cedres.  In one word: Don't.  First, there was mold all through the wallpaper in the bathroom, not something I really wanted to expose a 2 month old child to.  And while our arrival was reasonably simple, Madame herself turned out to be very difficult.  We returned late one night after touring, on the eve of Bastille Day, when the town was packed with both cars and pedestrians, and she couldn't be bothered to move her car 20 cm so that I could pull into the driveway.  Even after two weeks in France, I'm still stuck halfway between German and French, so my understanding of what she said was not so great, but she seemed to be saying she could not possibly step outside in her dressing gown to start her car.  Besides, her back hurt, I gathered.

I retreated, but upon finding a place to park I went back to the Inn and discovered that Madame was feeling plenty fine to climb three flights of stairs and lean out a window to watch the fireworks.  And then early one morning when we checked out, she had no trouble scampering outside in her dressing gown to move her car.

I suppose if it is your last choice, Relais Des Cedres is a reasonable place to sleep.  But be forewarned.  However, just next door is Hotel Tardif, with an excellent walled garden, which seemed like a much more peaceful place to spend one's holiday.

Comments on Mail Ordering Smallpox Genes

I've been debating whether to respond to James Randerson's recent front page story in The Guardian, "Revealed: the lax laws that could allow assembly of deadly virus DNA", about mail ordering genes for smallpox.  The bottom line is that the story as published is neither well-reported nor a particularly useful contribution to the discussion about emerging biological threats.

Years ago, I was fortunate to take a science writing class from the great science and war correspondent Malcom Browne, who for many years provided exceptional science reporting at The New York Times.  Among his  suggestions for an ideal (!) newspaper story is that it be no longer than a Haiku.  Of course, this makes all articles published in the history of the press less than ideal.  (No news there.)  Here is my version of the Guardian article:

Humans play with fire!
Newspaper sales are lagging!
Set our hair alight!

Alas, I've ignored most of the stylistic requirements for a Haiku (no mention of a season, or of nature), and the exclamation points are unforgivable.  Still, it captures the essence of Mr. Randerson's story.

Although the article does make one, albeit brief, nod to, "Legitimate reasons for researchers to buy lengths of DNA from pathogens, for example in developing treatments or vaccines against them," the majority of the text is simply alarmist and a rehash of arguments that have appeared previously (The New York Times, Wired, Technology Review; the list goes on).

The worst bit, from my perspective, is that Mr. Randerson promulgates the facetious notion that producing a live, infectious 1918 pandemic influenza virus is as easy as ordering out the DNA from a gullible company.  I've written about this before, and refer readers to those posts (here, and here).  This isn't quibbling on my part.  The capabilities of the technology are central to evaluating the immediacy of the threat.

The Guardian article spends many inches (not an Internet concept, those newsprint inches) announcing the need for regulation without even mentioning the potential detrimental effects of limiting access to the technology.  Because the threat is not immenent, instituting regulations would certainly only reduce our capacity to learn who is employing the technology and thus reduce our capacity to respond to any threats that do arise.  Again, arguments I have made extensively elsewhere (in Wired, at Future Brief, and in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism (via Kurzweilai.net), for example).

The short version of why regulation is bad is this: Because it is not physically possible to control access to the reagents or instrumentation used in DNA synthesis, our only defense in this situation is to keep track of, as best we can, who is doing what.  Our sole weapon is information, in other words.  The only thing regulation will do is cause people to be more secretive, whether they have a nefarious or an innocuous intent.  That is, regulation will restrict our ("we" being the good guys, of course) access to information.  Moreover, regulation in the U.K. and/or the U.S. will only limit activity in those countries.  You can order synthetic genes from a large number of convenient countries, these days.

In a companion article, "Lax laws, virus DNA and potential for terror", Mr. Randerson introduces his readers to Synthetic Biology:

Edward Hammond, a biological weapons expert with the Sunshine Project, an NGO that campaigns against the development of biological weapons, said: "The most worrisome thing ... is that [the field of synthetic biology] is going to enable people to create potentially very dangerous diseases that don't otherwise exist or to recreate ones that have been wiped off the face of the earth."

Mr. Randerson makes no effort to explain that you don't need synthetic methods to create new, potentially dangerous organisms.  (Harder to sell newspapers if you don't stoke the fires, after all.)  Breeding and artificial selection can produce pathogens for you, and these tried and true techniques will do a much better job of it.  And if you want a nasty bug ready-made, you just need to visit a poultry farm here in the US, where due to all those fantastic "growth hormones" a soil sample will provide you with Cipro-resistant anthrax. 

I was perplexed through the entire article why no mention was made of Drew Endy's efforts to synthesize novel viruses for the sake of learning how they work.  In other correspondence with Drew, I learned that he had been approached by Mr. Randerson, but was so troubled by the very idea of the article and project that he declined to participate or be interviewed.  Here (PDF warning) is a log of their email exchange.

The most remarkable thing about the email is that it demonstrates Mr. Randerson is hell bent on doing exactly what he warns against, namely letting loose in the world a sequence from a deadly pathogen that has been extinct in the wild for quite some time.  It doesn't matter that he introduced three small changes rendering the gene supposedly incapable of being used to produce a protein.  Those changes would be trivial for any college, and perhaps high school, student to remove (laborious, perhaps, but trivial), thus restoring the functionality of the smallpox gene.

By my reading, Randerson's correspondence with Drew clearly shows The Guardian reporter hasn't thought about the bigger context.  He had his teeth into a story and wedged himself into discussing only his own ill-informed conclusions rather than carefully exploring what it will take to keep us safe from emerging threats.  He simply didn't do his homework.

I hope The Guardian can do better in the future.

Confusion Over Indonesian H5N1 Outbreak

It seems there is a profusion of bad information about the present Indonesian H5N1 outbreak.  Over the last week, The New York Times has reported conflicting statements from the World Health Organization about whether the cluster of cases was caused by human to human transmission.  Somebody needs to make up their mind about when to talk to the press, and who to let speculate about the science when they obviously have no idea what's going on.  How are we supposed to have any confidence if they keep shooting from the hip before solid evidence is in hand?

As important as whether there was confirmed human to human spread is the issue of how the sequence is varying.  I wrote earlier this week about reports that changes in the human sequence appeared to put it closer to a feline sequence, but Wired News is carrying a Reuters story in which the WHO states otherwise:

"Sequencing ... found no evidence of genetic reassortment ... and no evidence of significant mutations," the United Nations health agency said in its statement.

I would note now that I'm not sure what Andrew Jeremijenko means by "the closest match we have to the human virus is from a cat virus."  I was unaware there was any distinction observed in the wild between viruses afflicting humans and felines.  But the point is that one agency is saying the virus is changing and may be related to something killing other mammals, while another says there are no mutations and can't make up its mind whether we already have human to human transmission.

People, get your shit together, please.  Don't talk to the press until you know what's going on.  This thing is scary and complicated enough as it is without having to sort through conflicting information from "official sources".