The US is heavily dependent on foreign oil for producing fossil fuels due to the fact that domestic crude oil supplies are sparse. The transportation fuel requirements in the U.S. alone are equivalent to greater than 150 billion gallons of fuel per year. There is an urgent need to develop efficient fuel production technologies from domestically available renewable sources such as municipal solid waste to improve solid waste management and handling and provide an alternative source of fuel that is domestically available in abundance. While progress has been made in renewable energy and renewable fuel production, several challenges still need to be overcome including: poor economics, lack of infrastructure and threat to existing resources. Lynntech proposes to develop a compact home based solid waste processor based on a hybrid plasma-catalytic approach to produce methanol and ethanol to be used as alternative transportation fuels or as fuel additives to conventional petrochemical fuels. Commercial Applications and Other
Benefits: Demonstrating the technical and economic viability of the proposed approach will offer every U.S household a local source of fuel and fuel additives derived from household distributed solid waste. The direct benefits of the proposed technology include utilization of negative value feedstock (MSW) to produce positive value product (methanol and ethanol), reduction of land filling, reduction of primary resource mining, and control of emissions from disposal of biomass wastes. Additionally, the proposed system will lead to significant fuel savings for every house hold and creating a transformational concept for solid waste handling in municipalities. The proposed system is also feedstock independent. This allows the luxury of utilizing the system in restaurants and hospitals to process other types of waste streams such as restaurant grease and medical waste respectively.
