[Gasification] Gasification Digest, Vol 35, Issue 8

[Peter & Kerry Davies]

I wouldn't recommend burning glycerin either.

We have successfully gasified Gycerin waste from a biodiesel plant added 
to wood chip without any measured toxic emissions, indeed it produced a 
higher calorific value gas compared to straight wood chip as it 
displaced the need for some of the normal air as an oxygen source 
(thereby reducing dilution with the normal nitrogen fraction as well as 
releasing more H2 from the added gycerin itself) so would not anticipate 
any issues with it as a binder in pellets where they were used in this 
way (at least through our system). We will have the opportunity to test 
this at least in the form of briquettes after August. The combustion 
engineers present for the earlier test were all a bit red faced at the 
time as I recall since they were predicting all sorts of dire things.

We are going through an EPA process at the moment to have our system 
"exempted" from the need for pollution permits, starting with clean wood 
waste as the benchmark but will be adding things like plastics and 
glycerin (along with much more problematic organics) in due course.

The real barrier to overcome is the insistence by the ignorant or 
mischievous in the environmental movement that gasification and 
combustion are interchangeable terms with similar problems. The result 
from a practical point of view is the cost of the stringent emission 
tests required is in the order of $25,000 per material being included 
where no dioxins are anticipated and only one targeted analysis for this 
is included (amongst the 20 general sample tests required) to confirm, 
up to $150,000 should they believe dioxins might be possible and this 
has to be repeated with all 20 samples.

What is amazing to us is our perpetual researcher "competitors" in this 
space in Australia generally have access to significant public grants, 
yet can't give a lab certified gas analysis from their systems only a 
"predicted" value based on a literature review, mostly of course citing 
references where the same thing was done...

Peter Davies



On 18/07/2013 4:00 AM, gasification-request at lists.bioenergylists.org wrote:
> On 7/16/2013 5:27 PM, J. Paul Villella wrote:
>> >other possible suitable binders are Long Strand Glycerines from the
>> >production of Biodiesel (they burn like plastic too but need a
>> >stabilizer/wick/co-burn agent )
> Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
>
> Burning glycerine produces acrolein. For some indications of its
> toxicity, see Feng, Z; Hu W, Hu Y, Tang M (October 2006). "Acrolein is
> a major cigarette-related lung cancer agent: Preferential binding at
> p53 mutational hotspots and inhibition of DNA repair"
> <http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0607031103v1>. /Proceedings of the
> National Academy of Sciences
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences>/
> *103* (42): 15404--15409.
>
> Better to compost the glycerine, make soap, or produce biogas.
>
>
> d.
> -- David William House "The Complete Biogas Handbook" 
> |www.completebiogas.com| /Vahid Biogas/, an alternative energy 
> consultancy |www.vahidbiogas.com

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