Very cool news. A portable refinery would be very nice in Iraq and elswhere. Imagine being able to convert the trash and any locally bought oil, into fuel for the rigs on your site? Kind of cool, and might actually save a little money and some lives, if they can reduce fuel convoys with this. Something to watch I guess. -Head Jundi
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Tactical biorefineries go to Iraq
By David Ehrlich
Published April 29, 2008 – 7:46am
Transporting fuel to military base camps is a dangerous job for soldiers, but a new biorefinery from the U.S. Army’s research and development center could cut down on the need for some of those fuel convoys, which are often targets in war zones.
The Army’s two prototypes of the Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery, or TGER, are shipping out to Victory Base Camp in Baghdad today for a 90 day test of the units under extreme working conditions.
The refineries, which can take in food slop, plastic, paper and styrofoam and output synthetic gas or hydrous ethanol, were developed by McLean, Va.-based defense contractor Defense Life Sciences, Purdue University and the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland.
“It actually hits about 130 degrees there in August,” said James Valdes, the scientific advisor for biotechnology at the Edgewood center, to Cleantech.com about Baghdad.
He said the TGERs, pronounced “tigers,” should be back stateside by then, but there will still be plenty of heat and other challenges for the biorefineries before the testing is done.
“I was there about a month ago. Every afternoon, as the wind kicks up — gets all the sand and dust in the air — very fine dust gets into everything,” said Valdes.
“You got dust, you got the heat. We’re under pretty austere conditions. You can’t just call up an engineering firm if something breaks.”
The two four-ton machines were designed to fit into standard ISO containers, bringing the technology down to a size that is easily transportable.
Take a look at one of the TGERs here >>
“The technology itself is really nothing new. What’s new about it is the way we put together two different technologies to have a hybrid,” said Valdes.
First, all the garbage is fed into a chute, where its ground into small pieces. Things like plastics, paper, cardboard and Styrofoam are pelletized and gasified in a downdraft gasifier.
“It’s not burned, it’s heated,” said Valdes. “And it breaks down into very simple hydrocarbons that are like a low-grade propane.”
Advanced fermentation is used for the food slop and field rations, which get converted into hydrous ethanol.
“We take those two streams and we blend them, and it gets aspirated into a standard Army generator set.”
Valdes said a TGER unit can handle about a ton of garbage a day, and currently runs a 60 kilowatt generator. But he said they could probably double that output with some minor improvements.
“What we feel is that it’s best to hook it into the actual power grid itself,” said Valdes. “If we could just hook it directly into a micro-grid at a forward operating base, it would just continuously add power.”
The first TGER unit cost about $800,000 to develop, with phase two of the research, which includes the development of the second unit plus the deployment to Iraq, costing $2.3 million.
The system isn’t without an environmental downside, with the TGER producing some carbon dioxide as a byproduct. But the potential as an alternative fuel source for the military could be significant.
“We don’t measure the cost of fuel in dollars, it’s measured in blood. Those convoys are targets,” said Valdes.
“So if we can keep some of the convoys off the roads, you cut down on the number of targets, you drastically cut down on fuel use, it’s a good thing all around.”
The only other byproducts from the TGERs are ash, which Valdes said was found to be a benign soil additive, and water.
If the tests in Iraq go well, the systems will be handed over to an Army program manager who will work with outside contractors and manufacturers to move the TGER from prototype to a mass-produced system.
Once the TGER is ready for prime time, there’s likely to be plenty of need for the units, and not just in the Army.
“The potential for something like a post-Katrina event is huge, because there was plenty of garbage, plenty of trash, but no power,” said Valdes.
“I could easily see something like these being at campsites, at hospitals, schools, anyplace where there’s a concentration of people producing lots of trash.”
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