12-Jul-2011….there is one British technology that can provide the ‘green’ backup power that is needed – the TORBED Energy Technologies.
There are more than 150 plants using this technology around the world in the process industries, now is the time to apply them to back up our British planned solar and wind resources.
The TORBED Energy Technologies have been adapted for:
* Production of a coal replacement (‘biocoal’) manufactured from organic wastes such as wood, agricultural residues and energy crops.
* Conversion of organic wastes directly to heat or useful gas for power generation and/or heating and valuable by-products.
* Drying of sludges, slurries and other wet solid fuels that otherwise cannot be usefully converted to energy.
Biocoal
Today, most electricity is produced from coal. We believe that in the future most electricity will be produced from biomass and wastes. This will cause a major leap forward in the decarbonisation of energy production while leveraging the enormous installed base of current power production assets and invested capital, making this major leap forward affordable and fast.
There is sufficient sustainable biomass in the world to turn it into the most significant and reliable source of renewable energy. However, when untreated, biomass is expensive to transport, store, and combust. Additionally, it can only be combusted (co-fired) to a limited extent in the current power plants.
These limitations are lifted when the biomass is first torrefied. Upgrading the biomass through torrefaction makes it cheaper to transport, store and combust, and enables large-scale co-firing (alongside fossil fuel such as coal or as a direct replacement) in existing energy plants without modification. Torrefaction is a necessary step to allow the large-scale, fast and affordable deployment of biomass as a fuel (‘biocoal’), so as to allow biomass to contribute meaningfully to the decarbonisation of the world’s energy supply.
After many years of research and development, the TORBED Energy Technologies have been put into full scale commercial production initially to produce 60,000 tonnes per annum output of biocoal per module.
Combustion and Gasification
The conversion of solid feed stocks to heat for heating and/or electrical power is a well served market at very large scale.
What the new TORBED Energy Technologies bring is true scalability from 1 to 20MW using combustion with the same fundamental technology. As gasifiers, this technology can produce up to 100MW of thermal output.
Converting this gas/heat energy to electricity, the output ranges from 0.25 to 25MW. These sizes suit distributed power plants – most wastes cannot be transported any great distances economically so local conversion of wastes to energy is most appropriate. Agricultural wastes such as straw are abundant and an ideal fuel for distributed heat and power generation.
Many industrial processes produce waste streams with energy that should be used. Paper recycling for example produces large quantities of waste sludge which is capable of being recycled to energy and recoverable solids.
Drying
Most sludges and slurries described above are too wet for direct combustion or gasification and a drying step is needed. The TORBED Energy Technologies are also in use for drying these difficult feed streams.
For further information, please contact us at sales@torftech.com
