Renewable and Recovered Energy Power Plants

Two challenges in the generation of electrical energy are limiting emissions, especially greenhouse gases and minimizing the environmental effects from mining or production of the fuels used in the plants. This is the idea behind a Recovered Energy Resources plant, to utilize renewable energy fuels, which are environmentally sound and cost effective.

Renewable energies are things that are organic and re-grow like plants, trees, or come from them such as sawdust and wood shavings, or corn stover. And renewable wastes can include animal manures that may be mixed with wood shavings or straw, like horse, chicken, or hog manure. The RER plant is designed to work with a variety of solid fuels including waste and by-products from the agricultural and forest industries including chicken and turkey litter, forestry thinning residues, baggasse, peanut shells, rice hulls, crop residues and other organic wastes.

RER power plants use a gasification process, which is a low emission technology. Tests have demonstrated that carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and sulfur oxides, particulates and other emission constituents are exceptionally low. Gasification is a clean energy conversion technology being developed for all sizes of solid fuel power plants. By implementing gasification technology an RER plant can use a broad array of renewable resource fuels.

An important aspect of the use of a renewable resource fuel is that because the CO2 emission produced by gasification is reabsorbed through plant photosynthesis during the next growing cycle, no additional carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere. In fact some energy crops absorb more carbon dioxide than they release during gasification, the difference being actually consumed by the plant.

Another class of fuels that can be used by an RER plant is called recovered resources. They include coal fines and coal mine waste, oil refinery solids and municipal solid waste. They are the by-products of mining, refining and daily life, considered wastes and discarded, as their usable energy cannot be extracted by conventional energy systems. RER plants can extract the usable energy, so the resource is recovered.

One such recovered resource are coal fines, the byproduct of coal production which present an environmental liability as they are routinely placed in lagoons or settling ponds that must be eventually dealt with when a mine ceases operation. They are a potential source of surface and groundwater contamination. Coal fines like coal used in conventional power plants contains sulfur, but the RER gasification process leaves virtually all of the sulfur behind in the ash. So as the valuable useable energy in the coal fines is recovered a potential environmental liability is eliminated.

As a turn-key energy solution provider, RER builds plants with electrical output capacities up to ~15 MW, and they have additional capability to produce thermal energy for heating and cooling, using ecologically sound technologies.