Waste to power

Miloud Ouadi*, John Brammer, Andreas Hornung, Martin Kay

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to specialist publicationArticle

15 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

There has been a growing trend towards the use of biomass as a primary energy source, which now contributes over 54% of the European pulp and paper industry energy needs [1]. The remaining part comes from natural gas, which to a large extent serves as the major source of energy for numerous recovered fiber paper mills located in regions with limited available forest resources. The cost of producing electricity to drive paper machinery and generate heat for steam is increasing as world demand for fossil fuels increases. Additionally, recovered fiber paper mills are also significant producers of fibrous sludge and reject waste material that can contain high amounts of useful energy. Currently, a majority of these waste fractions is disposed of by landspreading, incineration, or landfill. Paper mills must also pay a gate fee to process their waste streams in this way and the result of this is a further increase in operating costs. This work has developed methods to utilize the waste fractions produced at recovered fiber paper mills for the onsite production of combined heat and power (CHP) using advanced thermal conversion methods (pyrolysis and gasification) that are well suited to relatively small scales of throughput. The electrical power created would either be used onsite to power the paper making process or alternatively exported to the national grid, and the surplus heat created could also be used onsite or exported to a local customer. The focus of this paper is to give a general overview of the project progress so far and will present the experimental results of the most successful thermal conversion trials carried out by this work to date.

Original languageEnglish
Pages55-64
Number of pages10
Volume11
No.2
Specialist publicationTJ
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2012

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Media Technology
  • Chemical Engineering(all)
  • Chemistry(all)
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Materials Science(all)

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