[Gasification] Gasification Digest, Vol 29, Issue 7: scrubber water

[David Coote]

How were they handling the scrubber water, Tom? A colleague visited a 
reasonable size gasifier in Europe where the water was stored in a tank. 
Once this tank was full their immediate option was to install another 
tank. Not ideal!

Waste disposal is becoming increasingly expensive in Australia. This 
would increase the cost of the power.

Regards

David

On 1/02/2013 7:00 AM, gasification-request at lists.bioenergylists.org wrote:
> ------------------------------ Message: 20 Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2013 
> 09:32:11 -0800 From: "Tom Miles" <tmiles at trmiles.com> To: "'Discussion 
> of biomass pyrolysis and gasification'" 
> <gasification at lists.bioenergylists.org> Subject: Re: [Gasification] 
> Power Pallet Message-ID: <00f201cdffd8$e7c8ae80$b75a0b80$@trmiles.com> 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>> >yes, but remember that all that run these fuels to date are doing so by
>>      
> tolerating a dirty gas non tar solving reactor, and fighting the tar problem
> in the filtering.  on the low tech end this is nearly always a water
> scrubbing system, which really just>moves the toxic problem somewhere else,
> and actual real world running is highly unattractive.  yes, it will work for
> the demo, but the ongoing issues with the bongwater cofferdam challenges
> health, regulatory and general pleasurable>concerns.
>
> Not so fast. You can't write off "tar making" gasifiers completely. While
> your observation may be true for hundreds of low cost gasifiers now in use,
> in the last five years I have seen three small scale gas cleaning systems
> using wet scrubbers that would pass California air quality and safety
> regulations. One is produced commercially and was demonstrated at the 300
> kWe scale. Another was demonstrated at 300 KWe and used on a 1 MWe system.
> One was demonstrated on a 100 kWe downdraft gasifier generating 100 kWe from
> grass seed screenings. I know of another two in development for the 40 kWe
> scale. (I also know of at least one that has failed miserably.)
>
> Tar making gasifiers may be a solution for some very difficult but abundant
> fuel like rice husks and agricultural residues if the tars can be managed
> and destroyed acceptably.
>
> Tom
>