Cracking the code of 'non-recyclable' waste

'Non-recyclable' solid waste is complex and most mixed waste keep changing. Many gasification technologies, projects, and business cases have failed because they required extensive pre-processing to adapt the waste to the technology.. Boson Energy has turned this around, and chosen to instead adapted the technology to the waste stream – to create an environment that gives chemistry the time and conditions to do the work.

Boson Energy has developed an integrated proprietary reactor where drying, slow pyrolysis, gasification, and vitrification happen with a slow temperature gradient and driven by gravity rather than moving parts. This gives our technology unique ability to deliver syngas with high quality and stability, despite variations in waste composition and quality. As a last step, we apply plasma vitrification to the ash, to reach a true circular end of waste with zero residues.

We have chosen to use the plasma only as heat source for the process and for ash vitrification – after completion of the gasification stage . This means that the plasma assists the gasification rather than driving it directly. This minimizes carbon combustion in the process, resulting in a higher Hydrogen yield than other approaches. The plasma torches require power of course, which means that the HPAG system can either take that power from the grid, when that option is there – to maximise net H2 yield. The other option is to self generate power from the system's H2 output, to achieve maximum autonomy. Combining the two approaches allows for the system to deliver grid stabilising service for the local grid as an additional bonus.

Boson Energy's slow, gravity driven process delivers high performance on several key aspects; including waste stream flexibility, high yield, easy syngas conditioning/cleaning, zero solid residues requiring post treatment, processing capacity suitable for distributed solutions. All this at low capex and opex.

Incineration instantly combusts all Hydrogen and Carbon in the waste to produce heat. To produce steam. To produce power. Which is fed into the AC grid. All the time, which means large-scale baseload generation. This is a poor complement to the increasing amounts of intermittent power generation in our grids – which is a growing problem. Add to that the ash produced. 

Producing H2 with that power to increase flexibility, and use that H2 in a bus, is also not a viable option. That bus will effectively emit way more NOx and more CO2 per kilometer than even a diesel bus. With increasing demand for flexibility, ever stricter emission standards, and the extreme capex and opex required to capture flue gas CO2; incineration is reaching its ‘Kodak moment’.

Gasification, on the other hand, is a flexible next-generation thermochemical recycling technology that instead cracks the waste into H2 and CO for further chemical processing and capturing non-combustion CO2 by design. Boson has applied 3o+ years of research in a careful scale-up to commercial size. The result is a carbon-negative H2 and 99-95% lower emissions of NOx, Particulate Matter and other pollutants, as well as zero ash.

The HPAG reactor is only the first step in the Boson Energy Unit system solution. The full H2 potential of the HPAG Syngas output is achieved in a series of processes down­stream of the HPAG – including syngas conditioning and Water-Gas-Shift (WGS).

In these steps, additional H2 is produced by using the Carbon based compounds in the gas (mostly CO) to crack additional water – injected as steam. The upgraded syngas is then separated into H2 in fuel-cell quality and industrial-grade CO2 for further use or storage. There is also a small fraction of rest-gas that is cycled back into the system to produce heat/steam for the process.

These are the same processes used to make H2 from methane. The result is an overall Hydrogen yield exceeding 100% compared to the 'fuel bound' H2 originally present in the waste.

We have brought our core HPAG technology to TRL 7-8 – operating on real waste and scaled up from lab to industrial scale. All downstream systems converting the Syngas to H2 and CO2 are commercially available systems and delivered and integrated into the complete system by our global tier-1 technology and execution partners.

The final H2 yield, depends on several factors; including waste composition, the H2 and CO2 quality required, whether the plant uses external power for the process (maximum H2 output), or operates in autonomous mode (using own H2 for power).

We are now developing First Of A Kind commercial projects, where we will scale up the reactor from 1 ton to 2 tons per hour – which is the commercial size reactor. A standard Boson Energy Unit, will have 3 reactor lines, resulting in a total treatment capacity of some 100 tons of waste per day – to ensure redundancy of the system.

Boson has developed close cooperation with world leading partners to secure scale, standardisation, quality, and financing in rollout and project execution. Our strategic partners include several global and regional tier 1 companies.

With our partners, we have built a project execution model for end-to-end delivery of distributed solutions. The model allows for speed and high efficiencies of scale in development, execution and plant operation – – basically giving us 'unlimited' capacity to scale from day one.

It includes full turn-key project responsibility from reactor manufacturing, Balance of Plant and project execution; to H2 dispensing, storage, fuel cells, H2-powered heavy-duty fast charging, grid technology, and maintenance over full plant lifetime.

Boson’s integrated system radically improves environmental and financial performance compared to incineration – for the very same waste streams.

• Some 3x higher revenue and more than 10x higher profitability per ton treated to distribute across the value chain, compared to conventional incineration.
• Carbon negative at much lower cost than any other technology.
• Zero ash and radically reduced NOx and PM emissions.
• Water footprint cut so deep that we can even produce water.