“Ionic heat”? Looks like the promoters forgot to say “Nano Ionic Heat”. They should throw that in when they go to the California Assembly for their required operating subsidies.

Conservation of Mass — the heavy metals are not destroyed by “Ionic Heat”; they will end up somewhere in the system, and disposing of them in an over-regulated environment like CA may be expensive.

Talking about expense – “oxygen-enriched gas” will not be cheap either. The process may be technically feasible and work in the lab, but the economics could be challenging. Is there a large currently-unsatisfied potential market for hydrogen in Lancaster? If not, the hydrogen may have very low value.

Bob Sykes put his finger on probably the biggest under-estimated cost — the cost providing a collection & sorting system to prepare a suitable garbage stream which will not mess up the internals of this expensive plant.

There is another way. A Physical Chemist from Columbia circa 1940 published a method of REDUCTION rather than oxidation to process waste. The method is analogous to a blast furnace where the iron ore is substituted by the waste. Coke, lime stone and waste are reacted together in a continuous process. The Columbia professor was Jewish and blinded by a lab experiment early in his career. His papers on the topic could be tracked down in a top university library if one could discover his name. I heard of him and the process from one of my chemistry professors in the 1960s. I was never interested in pursuing the concept at the time despite my having access to a marvelous university library system.

We’ve been trying to use wastes to generate energy for over 100 years now. The attempts always fail for economic reasons. First, there is the collection costs. Wastes are distributed dilutely in cities and towns and need some sort of collection system: sewers, trash trucks, … Second the conversion of organic waste to some usable product like methane or hydrogen is always an expensive operation.

Methane is produced abundantly at nearly every sewage treatment plant, but the cost of cleaning it (greases, sulfides, nitrogen, carbon dioxide) and the cost of the gas burners is so great that methane is always burned off. It is always cheaper to buy natural gas from a distributor and use that as fuel at the sewage treatment plant than to use the methane produced on site.

There are additional issues with hydrogen from waste. Aside from the spectacularly expensive conversion process, there are storage and transportation issues. Pressurized hydrogen reacts with steel, causing embrittlement. Because of this, transport over any distant is unsafe, and hydrogen is almost always used where it is made.

The cheapest and most reliable way to get energy from waste is simply to burn it. That is true of both trash and sewage treatment sludges. The downside of trash burning, beside its cost, is that most municipal trashes produce some dioxines. That problem was enough to shut down nearly all the municipal trash burning plants build during the 1970′s.

The City of Lancaster has just shot itself in the head. The capital and operating costs of that plant will require heavy subsidies, which will divert funds from other municipal services.