Gerbilnow

22 Sentry Crescent, Palmerston, ACT 2913 Ph: (02) 6242 0124 email: AskGerbil@gerbilnow.com Web site: www.gerbilnow.com

Senior Manager Energy Policy Department of the Environment, Climate Change, Energy and Water Australian Capital Territory GPO Box 158 Canberra ACT 2601 Email: energypolicy@act.gov.au

Thursday, 04 March 2010

Dear Senior Manager Energy Policy, A Submission on the Australian Capital Territory Draft Sustainable Energy Policy 20102020 This submission offers some ideas for consideration with respect to the following outcomes identified in the Australian Capital Territorys draft Sustainable Energy Policy 20102020: Cleaner Generation (Outcome Two); Increased Renewable Generation (Outcome Three), and Reduced Emissions And Generate Renewable Energy From Waste (Outcome Seven). In my submission renewable natural gas is used to describe pipeline-quality natural gas that is created from renewable resources such as timber industry waste, crop residues, municipal waste, seaweed and algae. Key benefits of government policies to increase the manufacture and use of renewable natural gas are: Faster take-up of distributed energy generation technology. Low-cost carbon dioxide capture. Opportunities to participate in the manufacture and export of related technology and by-products. Rapid reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

Faster Take-Up of Distributed Energy Generation Technology The Australian Capital Territory uses landfill gas to generate electricity at its Mugga Lane landfill site: www.environmentcommissioner.act.gov.au This gas is about 50% by volume carbon dioxide that must be removed if the methane component is to be made suitable for distribution through the natural gas network. Cleaning this landfill gas to pipeline quality will allow it to be used far more efficiently. At present the landfill gas is burned in diesel-electric generators and over 50% of its available energy is wasted as heat.

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Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited (Melbourne, Australia) is a global leader in fuel cell development. Its BlueGen ceramic fuel cell product for installation into homes and other buildings convert natural gas into electricity and heat. The grid-connected units, which are about the size of a dishwasher, are highly efficient and cut carbon dioxide emissions by up to 75% compared to Victorias current brown coal power stations: www.cfcl.com.au Giving environmentally-aware consumers the choice to buy renewable natural gas will encourage the acceptance of this efficient fuel-cell technology. At present energy consumers may elect to buy electricity produced from renewable energy resources. A similar option for natural gas is desirable. Low-Cost Carbon Dioxide Capture Capturing highly concentrated carbon dioxide from natural gas and biogas is simple and inexpensive: www.naturalgas.org In contrast, capturing carbon dioxide that is mixed with the exhaust gases of fossilfuelled power stations is yet to be proven to be commercially viable. Carbon dioxide produced from natural gas can be sold as it has a number of commercial applications. When carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced to zero, the separation and capture of carbon dioxide from biogas provides a cost-effective method for lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Opportunities in Related Technology Carbon dioxide separation from biogas and natural gas is carried out in large-scale and small processing plants using a variety of techniques 1. Xebec Adsorption Inc. of Blainville, Quebec, Canada supplies integrated biogas plants to upgrade biogas to purified biomethane meeting pipeline or compressed natural gas quality specifications. Landfill Gas Recycling in Ohio: Montauk Energy Capital operates three methane gas recovery facilities at Rumpke Sanitary Landfill near Cincinnati: www.rumpkerecycling.com The plants convert the methane gas into natural gas energy using Xebec Adsorption Inc. technology: www.xebecinc.com The first landfill gas recovery facility at Rumpke Sanitary Landfill opened in 1986, the second plant opened in 1995 and the third plant opened in 2007. The facilities have the potential to recover approximately 15 million standard cubic feet of landfill gas daily, making the recovery operation the largest landfill gas-to-direct-pipeline facility in the world. The plants combine to provide enough natural gas energy for about 25,000 homes and businesses. The natural gas is distributed by Duke Energy Corp. 2. Technology collaboration offer - Cryogenic upgrading of biogas to natural gas or LNG with CO2 utilisation A Dutch Small-Medium Enterprise has developed an innovative technology to upgrade biogas to natural gas quality and at the same time produce liquid CO2 of industrial quality. It can be applied at any biogas producing installation and the CO2 can be used in greenhouses, etc. The company is looking for well established partners in the energy sector with extensive knowledge of the local markets. A license agreement and a commercial agreement with technical assistance are offered for cooperation: www.enterpriseeuropeni.com

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Existing natural gas refineries and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plants can also be used to extract carbon dioxide from biogas and synthetic natural gas (i. e. gas derived from fossil fuels such as brown coal) as well as from raw natural gas. Biogas production from waste materials and renewable bio-fuel crops is a rapidly growing segment of the renewable energy sector. Three examples of this technology are 1. GreatPoint Energy of Cambridge, Massachusetts is a natural resources company and the developer of a highly-efficient catalytic process known as hydromethanation by which coal, petroleum coke and biomass (wood waste, municipal solid waste, and energy crops such as poplar and switch grass) are converted directly into low-cost, clean, pipeline quality natural gas. GreatPoint Energy is able to reduce the operating temperature in the gasifier while directly promoting the reactions that yield methane. Under these mild catalytic conditions around 400C, less expensive reactor components can be utilized, pipeline grade methane is produced, and very low-cost carbon sources (such as lignite, sub-bituminous coal, petroleum coke and biomass) can be used as feedstock. Roughly half the carbon in the feedstock is removed for capture as a pure CO2 stream suitable for sequestration: www.greatpointenergy.com 2. Diversified Energy Corporation of Gilbert (a suburb of Phoenix), Arizona is commercialising its OmniGas molten-metals based gasification technology that uses a 1300C molten slag to gasify a wide range of hydrocarbon feedstocks (e.g., biomass, coal, petroleum coke, and wastes) for the production of an ultra-clean synthetic natural gas: www.diversified-energy.com 3. Sundrop Fuels Inc. of Louisville, Colorado is constructing a high-temperature solar-thermal biomass gasifier for converting almost any kind of biomass into clean bio-fuels. Mirrors focus enough solar radiation to raise the temperature of the gasifier to nearly 1300C, high enough to gasify any plant material: www.sundropfuels.com These technologies produce natural gas from a very wide range of materials that are presently considered to be waste. Fossil fuels such as brown and black coal can also be converted to natural gas with the same technologies. This means that the benefits of distributed energy generation can be achieved quickly and the fossil fuel component reduced over time without any reliance on new and expensive infrastructure. At present the Lower Molonglo Water Quality Control Plant in the Australian Capital Territory incinerates over 45 tonnes of sewage sludge every day: www.actewagl.com.au In every city in the world a huge volume of plastics and other non-biodegradable materials are added to landfills or pollute waterways. These are quite suitable for gasification. In Australia each year some twenty million tonnes of forest litter may be burnt annually in prescribed burning (estimated at the rate of 20 tonnes per hectare): www.environment.gov.au The opportunity exists to develop an environmentally sound harvesting technique to gather some of this forest litter. If successful this technology would provide a better solution to bushfire hazard reduction than prescribed burning while at the same time producing feedstock for gasification by the renewable energy industry.

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Rapid Reduction in Carbon Dioxide Emissions Significant benefits will result from the take-up of this distributed generation and gasification technology. For instance: when just 25% of world stationary energy requirements are produced from renewable sources it is possible to capture 100% of the carbon dioxide produced by coal-fired power stations. How can this be? The Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited BlueGen product is twice as efficient as large central power stations. This means that only 50% of the quantity of coal is required to deliver the same final amount of energy to consumers. In other words the problem is halved simply by using efficient fuel cells and distributing the generation of electricity and heat to where it is needed. (The energy that now requires 4 tonnes of carbon to be burned in a central coal-fired power station can be produced from just 2 tonnes of carbon.) The technologies available for gasification of biomass, waste material and coal result in the separation of 50% of the carbon in the feedstock as carbon dioxide. (The energy content of every 2 tonnes of carbon in the feedstock to a gasifier is transferred into just 1 tonne of carbon in the form of pure methane. The other 1 tonne of carbon is separated simply and cheaply as pure carbon dioxide.) When half of the energy in synthetic natural gas is coming from biomass and the other half is coming from coal, then the carbon dioxide that is separated contains the equivalent of 100% of the carbon that came from coal. (For every 2 tonnes of carbon fed into a gasifier, when 1 tonne of this carbon comes from coal, then the equivalent of ALL of that 1 tonne of carbon is simply and cheaply captured as carbon dioxide.) Biomass when it is growing extracts carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by photosyntheses. If some of this carbon dioxide is sequestered once it is separated after the production of renewable natural gas it is permanently removed from the earths atmosphere. As soon as slightly more than 1 tonne out of every 2 tonnes of carbon fed into gasifiers is coming from biomass, then the carbon dioxide that is captured will begin reducing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. We can reach this point beginning to lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as soon as we can achieve the production of just 25% of energy requirements from renewable biomass sources. Sincerely

Sokkha Dunstan Gerbilnow