THE FINER POINTS

I thank the Phoenix and writer Alex Irvine for the fine reporting on my invention. His story of just how people react when a new idea comes across their desk was excellent. I do hope people will start to listen to my story. Nobody likes to be confronted with new ideas. Yet, they can represent considerable opportunity for new wealth, excitement, jobs, etc. Also, the Phoenix story on the invention is its first print announcement, although it has been on display at www.optigasoptisteel.com for a month or so.

The article did a great job of explaining what’s happening with gasification, and I’d like to further clarify some critical points made in the story. For decades gasification has been missing something for becoming a successful mainstream energy technology. I believe it boils down to the molten slag bed. This slag bed enables the waste leg of the red hot cyclone to be easily gas-sealed by immersing it into the molten slag, which also creates a simple path to recycle that waste to further processing should any carbon escape in the gas flow. Obviously, best cyclone operation is critical to clean uses of the gas, although much further gas cleaning would take place. People who have seen how well a household cyclone vacuum cleaner works will understand the importance to this invention of successful application of this principle in a simple and foolproof way. It is what is missing from all other gasifier inventions.

Also, our TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) took the courageous step to show (completed this month) that fiber-optic laser spectrometers can measure gasification temperature and gas constituents accurately and within the gasifier itself, and once calibrated, the spectrometer never needs to be calibrated again. This is something equivalent to your wall thermostat in reliability, but it measures five or so different gas elements and gas temperatures, some exceeding 2500°F, at 10 or so different places within the machine simultaneously, using only a single laser but sharing it with all those other points in the process using fiber-optic techniques. TVA did this work for boilers, but it should work for a gasifier, too. There is also the specialty software business opportunity as well, which is needed to computer control the gasifier optimally by processing all the data from the on-line instruments.

Again, I thank the Phoenix for doing this story, but I felt I needed to emphasize a bit more the criticality of the cyclone and molten slag bath idea and new instrumentation breakthroughs by others that uniquely can make gasification a mainstream, successful technology to cleanly process coal and other carbonaceous fuels (like biomass) and/or wastes into electricity, petrochemicals, and even what are known as ultra clean liquid fuels. Once you have H2 (hydrogen) and CO (carbon monoxide) as gas constituents, they can be recombined into hundreds of products, or the pure H2 separated to power a hydrogen vehicle. But without a simple and reliable cost-effective syngas gasifier (the missing link) to do the first step, it’s only interesting talk and will never happen real-world on a large scale.

Lloyd Weaver, President

LEW Holdings LLC

Harpswell