Garbage to Gasoline: Converting Municipal Solid Waste to Liquid Fuels
Abstract
Liquid fuels are in high demand throughout the United States and crude oil is a finite
resource. With strain on conventional sources for liquid fuels, the unconventional
sources and new technologies to create liquid fuels are becoming more attractive as
alternative options. One such conversion technology uses municipal solid waste (MSW)
as the feedstock, offering the additional benefit of relief on another constrained
resource: landfills. This paper provides an overview of the principal technologies
that are being used to convert MSW to salable products and delves deeply into the
potential for facilities that gasify MSW and convert the synthetic gas (syngas) to
ethanol, diesel, or gasoline. The analysis also includes a financial model that assesses
the financial viability of such a project under many different conditions, including
financing choices (debt to equity ratio, project location, and interest rates). The
results of the financial model indicate that sorting costs, tipping fees, and fuel
prices have the largest effect on the financial viability of the project. In order
to make an adequate internal rate of return, fuel prices need to be high and the project
needs to be located in a region with high tipping fees. Other factors not accounted
for in the model can also significantly impact the viability of this technology, including
how the fuels are regulated under the Clean Air Act and which category they fall under
with the Renewable Fuel Standard. These fuels are still relatively new to the market
and the United States Environmental Protection Agency must clarify how they are defined
and which regulations they are subject to. Having regulatory certainty will eliminate
some risk for investors and will therefore make investing in MSW to liquid fuels conversion
projects more attractive in the future.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/6835Citation
Farver, Maura; & Frantz, Christopher (2013). Garbage to Gasoline: Converting Municipal Solid Waste to Liquid Fuels. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/6835.Collections
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