CleanBeta

Baghdad Builds A Biorefinery

As if we didn’t look stupid enough to the rest of the world, we’ve now decided to build a biorefinery in Baghdad.

Nobody wants to shuttle around Iraq if there’s an option to do otherwise.  Strangely, a new tactical biorefinery appears to be a potential solution, according to a new story by Cleantech Media.

The new biorefinery is a product of the U.S. Army’s research and development center, which says it could cut down on the need for fuel-transport convoys in Iraq, which have become popular targets for insurgent attacks.

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.

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.

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 only other byproducts from the TGERs are ash, which Valdes said was found to be a benign soil additive, and water.