Scientist, Paul T. Baskis and Synfuels Assets Management LLC. have been awarded many Patents, Domestic and Foreign, in the ‘Waste to Energy’ arena, throughout the years.
These Patents cover a wide range of processes including Wastewater Treatment Systems, a Thermal Processing of coal, plastic and organics into carbon, liquid and gaseous fuels and chemicals. Volatile Organic Collection Systems for the chemical and refining Industries and Extraction/Distillation of organic compounds.
Carbon is the Earth’s Natural Energy Currency
Carbon is the earth’s natural energy currency because all forms of carbon compounds are heavy enough to be held by the earths gravitational field. Unlike hydrogen, when in its elemental form, is too light to be retained by the earth’s gravity. When hydrogen is released by refueling a vehicle, it rises up to the top of the atmosphere and is blown away by the solar wind never to be part of the earth’s composition again.
“This is a serious problem and there is no hydrogen economy that is friendly to the earth”
Carbon on the other side has been the earths trusted energy currency for eons and is the foundation of the life cycle that is so important to the earth.
Man needs only to learn how to live within the life cycle of carbon transformation, so he does not alter the atmosphere too much and cause serious weather changes to occur. This can be done by providing alternative carbon sinks that will alleviate the atmospheric overloading that is presently a problem. One of those alternatives is the use of high carbon organic fertilizers. This is the type of fertilizer that is produced by the PEF facilities when processing organic materials such as manures and wood or other biomass wastes.
The PEF high carbon fertilizer is generally around a 5/5/5 fertilizer having 5% nitrogen, 5% Phosphorous and 5% potassium these are the macronutrients that are required for plant growth and development. Approximately 15-25% of the mass of the biomass is converted into fixed carbon that will become fixed in the soil and improve the soil texture and structure which will improve the plant growth and development.
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This carbon will be locked in the soil for decades or even centuries and provide long term carbon storage while improving the soil properties that are important to agriculture crop production. This is the promise of technology to solve the current issues of global climate change. These fertilizers are cheaper to produce than current mineral mining and processing and they do not further contribute to carbon emissions.
AET is proud of its commitment to these types of technologies and their ability to improve the lives of every person on earth.
Coal and how it was Formed
Until approximately 300 million years ago at the beginning of the Carboniferous period all plant life was less than waist high. Around this time plants evolved a method of producing lignin. Lignin is a very strong yet flexible material that allowed plants to grow higher and to bend in a high wind without breaking. This was the first trees that had ever lived on the earth.
Lignin had a characteristic that no life forms on earth were capable of dealing with, it was indigestible by any of the animal or microbial systems that were around at that time. It would be over 100 million years before termites would evolve and about the same for bacteria that were capable of eating lignin like Actinomycetes. Until these organisms developed the ability to digest lignin there was nothing that could recycle the carbon in the trees when they fell to the forest floor.
For over 100 million years the carbon from all of the trees that died and fell to the forest floor were subsequently buried and eventually turned into coal. This coal would continue to build up over this time and became the vast coal deposits that we mine for energy all over the planet.
Utility of Coal
Coal has been used by man for nearly 300 or more years. During this time the use of coal has been very inefficient whereby the coal was mined and burned for producing energy like electricity. There was no thought about the volatile hydrocarbon content of the coal and the possibility of producing valuable chemicals from it. So, these hydrocarbons were just burned up along with the coal. For a short time during the beginning of the industrial revolution coal was processed to make a variety of chemicals to include toluene, ammonia and town gas. However once oil was discovered the ease of mining and distributing the oil laid waste to the coal chemical industry.
Waste to Energy Fertilizers
Atlas has licensed a technology that a provides for the production of engineered fuels from high cellulose feed stocks primarily waste wood from a sawmill, waste manures from animal husbandry operations or wastepaper and cardboard from MSW. This process mimics to some degree the formation of coal as it happened during the Carboniferous period.
The waste material is thermally treated at a mild temperature and the cellulose is converted into fatty acids and simple sugars. These fatty acids and simple sugars are sent to an anaerobic digester to be converted into methane gas in around 5 hours.
The blue line in the chart above represent cellulose that was thermally treated, and the fatty acids and simple sugars rate of digestion as compared with a control of municipal sewage sludge. The cellulose used in this test was taken out of an anaerobic digester where it had been for 10-15 days. This PEF treated material made as much gas as the original dairy manure that was digested in a conventional anaerobic digester.
The lignin component of the thermally treated manure remained as a solid that was sent to be gasified and produced more high-quality methane gas with a BTU value of 1,000/cuft. the remaining carbon is high in minerals from the manure and can be used as a high-grade fertilizer and soil amendment. This fertilizer provides for an improvement in soil structure (a chemical characteristic of soil) and soil texture (a physical characteristic of soil) while increasing the cation exchange capacity of the soil (an electronic property of soil).
The gas produced from the gasifier is condensed to form a synthetic petroleum with an API of around 40-50. this will be dealt with more in the petroleum section.
Synfuels Assets Management LLC~ Energy Technologies 