Syngas or bust Inventor Lloyd Weaver has a big idea about making energy out of just about anything. How does heating your house with trash sound? BY ALEX IRVINE

Everyone’s worried about energy. Oil is spiking to $57 a barrel, LNG brings with it worries of terrorism, coal causes health problems; wind turbines are ugly, solar power is inefficient, nuclear plants cause waste problems that might outlive the human species. And let’s not even get into the geopolitical problems.

Closer to home, Mainers pay more for electricity than people in most other states, partially because of distance from sources and partially because of a program of energy diversification undertaken by state government in the 1980s, when it was feared that rising oil prices would crush the Maine economy by making electricity prohibitively expensive. Oil prices fell instead, and a number of the programs were discontinued, leaving Maine consumers with nearly $2 billion in stranded costs, amortized over who knows how many years of electric bills. Now that oil prices have finally reached the levels anticipated 20 years ago, it seems like energy diversification wasn’t so much wrongheaded as ahead of its time.

Now, perhaps, the time has arrived. A number of Maine companies are pursuing wind-power projects, biomass is becoming a viable method of generating power at some of the state’s larger industrial concerns — especially paper mills — and Governor Baldacci recently proclaimed that he wants energy "to be as much a part of our economy as biomedical or financial services."

Harpswell inventor Lloyd Weaver wants that, too. The co-founder of SeptiTech, a Gray-based wastewater engineering firm, and long-time inventor has been involved in energy and environmental issues for more than 20 years in Maine. He was an active Green back when John Rensenbrink was getting the national party going, and he was a vocal supporter of Maine’s bottle-deposit law (a decision he now regrets, saying the state should have gone for comprehensive recycling instead).

Now, while the mainstream of environmental activists are pushing for renewable energy development, Weaver — newly re-registered as a Green after several years going back and forth between the two big parties — is looking back to, of all places, fossil fuels for the next step in environmentally friendly energy. And he’s not looking at just any fossil fuel, but the mercury-releasing, smog-causing, acid-rain-generating progenitor of the Industrial Revolution: coal.

Weaver can wax slightly poetic on the topic of coal. He envisions clean coal-powered energy production revitalizing Maine’s economy and freeing the United States from its mutually self-destructive dependence on the Middle East; he envisions a next-generation production technology that turns forest-products scraps and municipal solid waste into energy or materials for chemical production; he even envisions Bath Iron Works retrofitted to produce coal freighters in the increasingly likely event that the federal government decides to make all of its destroyers in Mississippi.

What is the technology that will make all this happen?

Syngas.

Syngas is one of those peripheral energy technologies that doesn’t get much attention because it isn’t as sexy and utopian as solar or hydrogen power, and it doesn’t fit into the standard fossil-fuel refinement infrastructure. Fundamentally, it’s what you get when you take organic material — usually coal — and subject it to intense temperatures and pressures while injecting water and oxygen to prevent it from actually burning. The coal turns into slag (which you can air-dry and use to make concrete), and water and oxygen are injected into the slag. Carbon monoxide and free hydrogen are the primary products that come out the other end, which can then be cleaned, harvested, and used as fuel for energy production or as raw materials for the manufacture of chemicals. The process is called gasification, and the machines that do it are called gasifiers.

The operation of your average gasifier isn’t all that different from a blast furnace, but the devil is in the details, and gasification hasn’t seized a comfortable place in the energy market because existing gasifiers are either mechanically finicky or not efficient enough to draw people away from standard, dirtier uses of coal. Another factor working against the widespread adoption of gasifiers is that coal is the Darth Vader of energy sources. Burning it releases not only mercury but nitrogen and sulfur compounds that cause acid rain and smog; scrubbing the sulfur and mercury out can cost power companies millions of dollars; and the extraction of coal is an ongoing environmental disaster in areas of the country such as West Virginia, where entire mountains are being processed and the toxic remains dumped into Appalachian river valleys.

But there’s a whole lot of coal in the United States — more than two hundred years’ supply at current rates of use, according to the Department of Energy — and it’s cheap, and energy producers neither have to rely on the whims of OPEC nor quietly agitate for neo-imperialist power grabs in order to get it. So what if there was a way to produce energy with coal while avoiding all of the traditional environmental pitfalls of actually burning it?

Lloyd Weaver thinks there’s a way.

Weaver has been working on syngas technology for 20 years, filing for his first related patent in 1985 (it was granted in 1987) and refining his ideas since then. His latest concept, called OptiGas/OptiSteel, proposes to solve the gasification industry’s problem by melding the tried-and-true technology of the steelmaking process with state-of-the-art computerized monitoring.

The trouble is getting anybody to listen.

Gasification research is currently dominated by all of the giant energy concerns you’d expect — Texaco, Shell, ConocoPhillips — as well as manufacturing giants like Mitsubishi and General Electric. It’s tough for a lone inventor to get any traction, and when it comes to innovation, Weaver says, CEOs of big energy companies "talk the talk, but they don’t walk the walk."

Currently Weaver’s trying to walk the walk by pursuing three patents related to the OptiGas/OptiSteel process, while simultaneously trying to drum up funding to create a bench-scale model of his gasifier, which would cost something like a million dollars to get up and running. Finding a million dollars isn’t easy anywhere, and it’s especially tough in Maine, where venture capitalists are few and far between and the R&D environment isn’t exactly thriving the way it is in other places with a higher density of high-tech enterprises. Maine does have an Office of Energy Independence (OEI), led by Beth Nagusky, and Weaver has been talking with her as well as people in the Department of Economic and Community Development.

The state of Maine and in-state developers, Nagusky says, are "pursuing a whole host of different technologies that would be alternative energy supplies for Maine, including a number of biofuels and bioproducts" — as well as wind and even tidal power. "As the price of petrofuels go up, they all look more economic, and they’re cleaner."

Since Maine isn’t a coal state, though, it might be harder for Weaver to get interest from in-state funding sources. "A process that relies on a Maine resource as opposed to an imported energy resource might be more attractive," Nagusky says, "but I don’t know if we have criteria in place that require that."

Weaver does envision OptiGas eventually being used to render biofuels and solid waste, but his proposal focuses on coal because it is the most carbon-rich potential fuel. This makes Nagusky hesitate a little. "Certainly coal gasification is cleaner than traditional coal. It still involves the extraction of coal," she says. "But you have to recognize that with any energy source, you’re going to have some impacts."

OEI energy-policy analyst Uldis Vanags says, "It’s impossible to make an assessment without complete information, but it sounds like an interesting idea. He’s a person that has a lot of experience in the field, and I’d like to hear him out." One initial problem according to Vanags is that Weaver’s proposal has "some loose ends" in the area of economic viability. He’s conscious of the tight grant climate right now, and suggests that OEI can help Weaver get moving with the Department of Economic and Community Development; in the end, though, given the dollars involved, OptiGas might need a Department of Energy grant rather than assistance from the state level. The DoE previously funded a gasifier in Vermont, Vanags says, but it didn’t pay off, and the industry is in need of innovation to jumpstart it.

What the state can do, Vanags says, is help Weaver get a seed grant from the Maine Technology Institute, for purposes of doing an economic study. "A study like that would be a good first step. You need to have a lot of information up front" when applying for large grants, Vanags notes, and a more complete economic assessment would help Weaver in a federal grant process.

James Childress, executive director of the Gasification Technologies Council (GTC), the primary trade group in this emerging industry, says that Europe and Japan are ahead of the United States in gasifier innovation. "There are places, especially in northern Europe, Finland, Sweden, where they do have wood-chip gasification plants that have been running for quite a while. That’s the only place in the world I’m aware of that biomass on a continuing basis has been successfully run."

Biomass has been even less successful, Childress says, "simply because it’s so difficult to handle. It doesn’t have enough energy content per pound. You can’t put enough of it into a gasifier to generate enough gas to use for anything." Then he adds, "But I just got off the phone with a guy from the Department of Agriculture, and they’re interested."