Regional Resource Recovery

Reduce, Recover and Recycle

About

Regional Resource Recovery

Regional Resource Recovery Pty Ltd seeks to create sustainable jobs in rural Australia by using waste and energy more efficiently. In our opinion, regional Australia will benefit the most out of a hydrogen economy due the long distances between towns and the long haulage routes. Hydrogen can to replace diesel energy in a fuel cell truck or generator. Using hydrogen should have less maintenance compared to a diesel powered truck or generator.

Each project is bespoke to the client’s energy needs and the waste being process. Nevertheless, the types of technology we could use in a project are:

Gasification and scrubbing

Gasification has been used for about 100 years. This is where you cook an organic material and it breaks down into smoke and char. The scrubbers clean the smoke so that it safely burns. The gas made by such a process is called synthesis gas or more commonly syn-gas.

Small scale Combined Heat and Power Plants (CHPP)

These plants not only generated base load electricity for clients but they also have co-products of process steam and hot water. A large scale power station may only use 35% of the energy in the coal as electricity. However, a CHPP may covert up to 80% of the energy in the gas to electricity and process steam and heat.

Hydronic heating and cooling

Waste heat obviously can be used for space heating but it can also be used for cooling down to 10oC using a absorption chiller.

Gas separation

Syn-gas is normally 35 to 45% hydrogen. This hydrogen can be separated from the syn-gas and purified so that it can be used in fuel cells.

Fuel cells

These convert the hydrogen to water by combining with oxygen from the air and in doing so produce electricity.

Chemical assaying

The waste are in fact a resource to be managed. Measuring the waste chemistry is a big part of this management. Also, emission must also be controlled, measured and reported.

What are we

Reducing

Recovering

Recycling

How will this create jobs

We are offering options to rural Australia.
We believe we can produce hydrogen (from waste) as cheap as diesel in terms of cost of 100km of transport
We believe we can produce electricity competitive with mains electricity
We believe we can produce process steam competitive with LPG fired boilers
We are based in rural communities and will employ people from those communities

Test Project

Resource Recovery Plant

That plant produced valuable, very clean burning synthesis gas (syn-gas) and char. That syn-gas was 35 to 45% hydrogen. We are examining opportunities for recovery the hydrogen and nutrients and energy in regional Australia.
The end product depends very much on the inputs and the scrubbing of any gas output. We have the scrubbing technology and that has been tested.

RESULTS

Resource Recovery Plant

Produced a syn-gas that has a very, very low concentration of the tarry, corrosive compounds phenol and cresols (undetectable at 800 degrees celcius)
Demonstrated that the water recovered from drying is contaminated by phenol and cresol. Nevertheless this water can be simply treated. The result is that creek life can flourish in this treated water. This means that the process can made be water neutral, or even slightly water positive, which is very import for inland Australia or other places that suffer extended dry seasons.
Demonstrated the efficacy of the hot scrubber, particularly when there is a low oxygen flow to this scrubber. It was particularly pleasing to see that the there was very little efficiency loss with the scrubber at temperatures as low as 400 degrees celcius. This has very good ramification to the environment when we apply this technology to potentially contaminated wastes like municipal solid waste.
Demonstrated the low ignition temperature of reactive feedstock which has ramifications for the efficient drying of wet, granular, materials.
This syn-gas can be produced from renewable feed stocks like timber mill waste, feed lot waste, energy crops like “enercane” which can be irrigated with salty ground water on non-arable land and other wastes like municipal solid waste.
The syn-gas so produced is typically 34 to 44% hydrogen

Investigation into the use of biomass as a feedstock for low emission energy generation is not new . However, what is new, is the existence of a technology that allows the scale of a project to be “micro” (by comparison to centralised power generation) such that it is economically viable at a small scale.

Regional Resource Recovery