Is Waste to Energy Conversion through Plasmogasification Feasible? An Analysis of the Plasco Energy Group

So I wrote up my Reaction Paper trying to answer some questions that you all asked me after my presentation on the Plasco Energy Group. I modified my analysis to include a high and low projection for Renewable Energy Credits benefits and obtained a larger operating cost for a plant that uses Plasmogasification. The project is still feasible, but has a much lower net margin. Here is the complete paper, sorry about the formatting, I tried to make the images fit:


The Plasco Energy Group is a company that is using Plasmogasification to solve the two problems of high cost of disposing landfill and excessive CO₂ emissions from current electricity generation. It is solving both of these issues by taking landfill waste as feedstock for its power plant and producing clean electricity and other useful by products like potable water and construction aggregate. 1 Ton of processed landfill waste will generate 1 MWhr of electricity, 200 liters of potable water, 150kg of construction aggregate, and 11 kg of heavy metals. In this paper, a cost benefit analysis of Plasco Energy Group’s technology is done to determine if the technology is viable.

1) Benefits from using landfill waste:

2) Dollars earned from generating electricity: $22 million / year

3) Benefits from Renewable Energy Credits:

High Projection: $35 million/year

Low Projection: = $17 million/year

4) Dollars saved from reducing CO₂ emissions:

5) Dollars saved from byproducts:

Water:

Construction Slag:

The benefits of the 200 MW Plasco Energy Group power plant totaled $66.7million/year. The costs of the same plant are shown below:

1) Capital Cost of the Plant: $ 32million

2) Operating cost of plant: $ 9million/year

3) Cost of land to build the plant: 3 acres = $300,000 in Glendora, California

4) Cost to transport feedstock:

5) Cost to dispose heavy metals:

Total cost of plant = $ 48.52million/year. Looking at the cost to benefits, we get: $66.7-$48.52 million/year= +$18.18million/year. So with the new changes, the plant is still feasible from a cost/benefit analysis, albeit with a much smaller net margin.

Some objections to this argument could be as follows:

1) The process of REC pricing is highly subjective and still varies widely, how are these REC prices chosen and why this method to calculate them? REC prices are going to change a lot, but its price projections fall under a general range of prices and that is what was being captured with the low and high projections for REC prices in the calculations. That way, a best and worst case scenario is considered.

2) The operating costs of a power plant with such a new technology is not comparable to any existing power plants, how were these operating costs obtained for the power plant? Even though costs of the plant is very difficult to find for such a new technology, prices for similar plants that use Plasmagasification were found and these prices were adjusted for the 200MW power plant that is being used in the cost benefit analysis.