Close to 100 people filed into the auditorium at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology (NVIT) amphitheatre last Thursday afternoon for a information session on a technology called pyrolysis.
It was pitched by Emergent Waste Soultions CEO Kevin Hull, who was invited up to speak by the Friends of the Nicola Valley Society (FNVS).
Hull’s company’s claim is that pyrolysis converts waste into products that reduce the need for fossil fuels and generate profits.
“Biosolids are placed in an oxygen deprived environment and heated to a point at which the composite chemical makeup of the feedstock separates and the molecules recombine into usable products like fuel oil, syngas and a charcoal like product called bio-char,” says the company’s website.
The company has one plant that will be commissioned at the start of 2016, in Vegreville, Alberta. That plant will use rubber tires as the feedstock, but Hull says what’s put into the plant doesn’t matter — as long as it is carbon-based, the result will be the same.
“This process has been tested on biosolids at the university level, and in numerous places,” he said. “We’ve tested it on biosolids on a small plant we built for research and development purposes, and it works beautifully. It’s a carbon based matter, it really doesn’t matter what form that carbon base is in at the molecular structure, it’s all very similar. When you break that carbon based material down you’re going to get gas and oil and a solid carbon in a powder form.”
