Downed trees and limbs from storms produces
copious amounts of usable biomass for the production of energy. |
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Loading biomass chips at a shipyard.
Photo courtesy Green Energy Resources. (See gallery) |
HUNTINGTON, N.Y., USA -- Who would have ever thought that someone could
actually profit ethically off the destruction from a storm such as hurricane
Katrina or other lesser storms?
If your job is selling biomass to utility companies to produce electricity, when
you see disasters you also see profit: a powerful storm produces a significant
quantity of available wood waste. Those downed trees and limbs are ideal
biomass, and they make up the bulk of the clean-up after a storm.
The difficulty is that you need the cooperation of the governments involved.
Sometimes the wheels of bureaucracy move slowly, and the
we've-always-done-it-this-way mentality gets in the way of better solutions. The
old way is to send all this slash to landfills or to just burn it. That serves
only to increase the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere without
producing any noticeable benefits in either economic growth or usable power.
All the splintered trees and branches have to be gathered up anyway. This wood
may even be put through a chipper at great expenditure of energy -- but it has
been common practice to regard the end product as a useless heap, fit only for
burning or consigning to landfill. However, if the chipped wood were sold as
fuel, this would help recoup the cost of cleaning up after the storm.
Even some portions of the wreckage from buildings could be recovered. Formed
into pellets, this recycled wood can be used in coal-burning power plants. This
is a project ideal for local entrepreneurs willing to take it on. When a
building goes down, these local harvesting companies would be the ones to call
in to salvage usable portions of the materials that remain. Rather than having
to pay someone to haul away all of the destroyed building, the damaged party can
actually receive some money for the biomass materials. Getting some money for
garbage comes as a small bright spot after the heartbreak of major losses.
Its not only clean wood that should be considered as biomass. German inventor
Christian Koch says he can transform rubbish including waste paper and
plastic materials into fuel. He holds a patent for the KDV 500, which he
says produces high-quality fuel. From any type of hydrocarbon input, the
low-temperature catalytic process produces synthetic light fuel, similar to
regular diesel oil but without any dioxin or furan byproducts.
Joseph Murray, CEO of Green Energy Resources, makes his living matching sources
of biomass with utility companies that run on it. Primarily, his clients are in
Europe, but the U.S. has its share of biomass-utilizing power companies. Murray
estimates that there is at least one such facility in each state of the nation.
He says that each hurricane provides a new opportunity to strengthen our economy
and energy security, and to develop new export markets to improve our balance of
trade. He even goes so far as to say that the abundance of biomass for
renewable energy from each destructive weather event could power up to 10% of
America's total energy demand.
He has been petitioning the government to enact legislation to subsidize
chipping and hauling machinery. The efficient expenditure of funds for this
waste-to-energy project helps reduce our dependence on oil because of the
energy-generation capability of the resulting product.
Murray points out that turning disaster into energy aids in economic recovery,
creates jobs, develops new export markets, alleviates demand for costly
landfill, and provides the states with badly needed revenue streams.
Green Energy Resources has pledged to purchase up to one million tons of
hurricane-damaged wood from Louisiana and Mississippi. The company will pay the
shipping costs to the destination where it will be used for fuel for generating
electricity.
# # #
SOURCES:
- Phone interview with Joseph Murray
- Green Energy Resources press release at PrimeZone;
Sept. 12, 2005
- I
Never Used Dead Cats for Fuel - A German inventor said he has developed
a method (KDV 500) to produce crude oil products from waste, that, he
believes, can be an answer to the soaring costs of fuel. He denies a German
newspaper story which implied that he also used dead cats (as a fuel
source). (Reuters; Sept. 7, 2005)
- http://www.nanokat.net/ - Christian
Koch's website. KDV 500 converts waste to fuel.
CONTACTS:
Green Energy Resources
Joseph Murray <email >
631-375-7921
www.greenenergyresources.com
NANOKAT Sales GmbH
Sόdliche Auffahrtsallee 75
80639 Mόnchen
Tel. +49 351 4273093
Fax. +49 721 15142052
email: info@nanokat.net
http://www.nanokat.net/
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