Podcast: John Loughlin with Guest Dr. Terry Mazanec

Transcript

John:

I follow weird things that I find interesting, as I’m sure if you’ve listened to the show for more than 10 minutes, you would know that. And one of the things that I’ve always been fascinated with is biomass and the use of waste to create energy. One of the things we have a tremendous amount of is what we in the industry call “MSW,” which is municipal solid waste. And we also have regulated medical waste as well, which is a discussion for another time. And we don’t seem to be doing much as a state to reduce that. I mean, we recycle. We find people in the city of Providence if they don’t properly sort their recyclables, but only a small percentage of what we send to the central landfill as recyclables get recycled – most of it ends up in the central landfill. And so, I was very intrigued, and I think it was on the Gene Valicenti Show, the morning show from 6 to 9 you can hear weekdays on WPRO, where he was talking to Vin Mesolella, who is a former member of the Rhode Island General Assembly. He was in the General Assembly before I showed up there, so I’ve never actually met the guy, but one of his claims to fame is he’s the chairman of what we call in Rhode Island, “NBC,” which is the Narragansett Bay Commission. And Vin was talking about a process called paralysis, and I’m probably mispronouncing it, but paralysis, as we explained earlier, is basically heating certain substances to very high temperatures in the absence of air, and then basically breaking them down to their sub-components. And so I thought that was kind of an outlier because you don’t necessarily think of that as a “green” technology. And then I heard Senator Lou Raptakis, who was a senator from Coventry mention it as well. At the same time working its way through the general assembly, it did not ultimately pass, was legislation outlawing the process of paralysis in gasification and plasma arc and all the other stuff.

So I thought it would be a good idea to maybe let’s get smart on what paralysis is. And the best guy to do that is Dr. Terry Mazanec. He is a PhD, graduated with a PhD in inorganic chemistry from the Ohio State University. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne, which is where I believe they built the first nuclear reactor. I could be wrong in that – it might be University of Chicago, but he’s been involved in renewables and fuels and chemicals for about 40 years. So he kind of knows what he’s talking about. He comes to us from an organization called Lee Enterprises Consulting. Dr. Masnick, welcome to the broadcast.

Terry:

Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. And I’ll say I was much amused by the introduction to your show. It was really good!

John:

Well, I’m glad we were able to entertain you here on a Saturday morning, but it’s largely biographical, so to speak. In any case, I wanted to kind of get a layman’s breakdown, and I’m probably still pronouncing it wrong. Paralysis, which is I guess the pyrolysis. Yes, pyrolysis. Okay. Because I’ve always called it pyrolysis because I thought of the heat element of it. Anyway, kind of a quick layman’s term thumbnail of what exactly that is.

Terry:

Okay. Well pyrolysis, the “pyro” part is heat. Pyromaniac guys start fires, right? The pyro is the heat, and “lysis” means cut in Greek. So you put those two together, it’s using heat to cut and it’s using heat to cut molecules. And you were mentioning biomass. And the other one that people are real focused on these days is the plastics, waste plastics like MSW. And basically what you do is you take some of this material, whatever you’re interested in, and if it’s going to be something for green energy, you want to start with something that’s bio-derived such as biomass, which can be things like wood chips or newspaper, anything like that. And they put it in a, typically it’s some kind of enclosed vessel. Typically it might be a long pipe that has an auger or a screw that pushes material through it. And they do this without air. In other words, they use nitrogen or some other inner in there because if you have air involved, of course it’s just like newspaper in your garden or in your fireplace, it’s going to burn. So you don’t want to burn it…this is heating it without burning it, without combustion. And you don’t want to do combustion because that makes CO₂ and that releases all the energy. What you want to do is supply enough energy to break up those molecules into smaller pieces that then you can work with to make useful materials. And you can make fuels out of them, you can make chemicals out of them, and in some cases you can even make food stuffs and other things out of them in small quantities.

**Commercial Break**

Terry:

So that’s basically what paralysis is. It’s heating up materials to break them down into smaller fragments.

John:

In the absence of oxygen.

Terry:

In the absence of oxygen,

John:

I know that, and I obviously just scratched the surface on many of these areas, but I know when we were discussing plasma arcing and that sort of thing that they say that basically it breaks the materials down to its simplest compounds, the most numerous of which being hydrogen, which can then be captured and used as a fuel. Is pyrolysis the same way?

Terry:

Well, plasma can be used for pyrolysis. It’s one of the sources of heat. Basically, if you think of pyrolysis, as you slowly heat something up at first, you get a little bit of breakage, and then the hotter you go, the more breakage you get into smaller and smaller pieces. And plasma is a very high-temperature energy source. And so you break it up into the smallest pieces possible, which are things like hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, maybe methane, depending upon what the mix is. So the plasma is a very high-temperature process for doing that. And one way to think about pyrolysis, is that if you’re thinking about plastics, I know that’s something that people are real interested in… A plastic is a big long polymer, might have a thousand atoms or more in it. Okay? And when you pyrolize it, basically you’re kind of randomly cutting it into shorter chains. So you have a mix of all of these shorter chains of molecules, and some of them are short enough that they’re gases like methane, ethane, and some of them are real long, they’re like waxes. But then the ones in the middle are things that are fuels – like diesel fuel, gasoline, jet fuel, and those are the ones that people are interested in for liquid fuels. If you run it at the much higher temperature, as you mentioned with the plasma, then you break it down into hydrogen CO, CO2, some water, and you could take that gas that’s formed and you can use that in a gas engine to generate electricity. You can burn it basically in a gas engine, in a combustion engine.

John:

Now, the process of the plasma itself, as I understand it, the plasma is roughly equates to what you would see if you were able to actually cut a section of a lightning bolt out and put it in a machine that’s that high temperature and that high energy. And one of the things that they use that I understand that’s an application for this, is to be able to take municipal solid waste and turn it into usable fuel. And by and large carbon, that you could use for road macadam or other purposes.

Terry:

You can. When you think about doing a paralysis or heating, anything, you typically want to use the least expensive source of heat or energy that you can. And a plasma is kind of an expensive one compared to others because driven by electricity typically – generate the plasma on a very high electric discharge. And that’s an energy intensive process. If you were to burn a natural gas, or coal, or wood or something, those are much cheaper sources of energy. You don’t get quite as high a temperature, but you can get pretty high temperatures. So you want to use the cheapest source you can. Typically, plasmas are used more as a polishing step where you do a first step with the cheaper energy, and then you’ll take some of the product, especially the products that you don’t want, that are not as valuable, and then heat those up much higher with the plasma to make the gas. That way you use less of the more expensive energy, and most of it is the cheaper energy.

John:

Now at this point, are there any industrial-size applications of this technology in use in places other than obviously the United States?

Terry:

Yeah, there are. It’s pretty popular in Europe for generating electricity. They do pyrolysis of biomass to make a gas, a synthesis kind of gas, some hydrogens and seal and some other things, and then burn that in a generator to generate electricity. There are many more plants in Europe than there are in the US of that type. And there are some companies working on, rather than making a gas to burn it, they’ll make a gas and then use that as a feed, and convert that gas into something else. And there are some companies, there’s one in particular in Canada that’s pretty advanced in this, but there are others … there’s probably a couple of dozen around the world that are working on this.

John:

And then let me ask you this. First of all, can you stay with me through the commercial break? I’ve got to take a quick station break if you can stay with me, my guess on the Secon Supply hotline, Dr. Terry Mazanec, and he is an expert in biofuels and paralysis. Pyrolysis. I’m never going to pronounce it right. Just bear with me and we’ll be right back with more of the John Loughlin show.

**Commercial Break**

This, my guest on the line is on the Secon Supply hotline, of course, is Dr. Terry Mazanec. And he is an expert, as I said, PhD inorganic chemistry, which is, I guarantee you a course I is eschewed in my college career for many reasons, one of which has involved a lot of numbers. And I wasn’t so good with numbers. Letters and words, good … numbers, not so much. But one of the things I wanted to ask the doctor about is: I could envision, and I don’t know if this is a correct use of the technology, but a situation in which we could have a facility located at our central landfill that not only takes the steady stream of municipal solid waste that we generate every day here in the state of Rhode Island, but could actually have the ability to go in and mine the landfill to use that to create a supplemental source of energy. And is that something that the technology could support at some point?

Terry:

Well, certainly the technology could do that. The question is going to be, is that the best thing to do? If you think about it, where we get energy from coal or from oil, those things have already gone through pyrolysis in the earth. Plants lived millions of years ago, died and were crushed and heated for a long, long time, and that’s how we got oil and coal. So the pyrolysis has already gone on. The earth has already put the energy in. If we are going to use municipal solid waste or plastics or something, we have to put the energy in. And so it’s a little bit more difficult. And the other thing about oil and coal and those things, is they’re concentrated in one place in a very high concentration. The coal itself has a lot of energy and there’s some dirt in it, but it’s not like MSW where you’ve got rocks, and you’ve got bottles, and you’ve got cans, and you’ve got diapers, and you’ve got all sorts of things. And so the amount of energy that’s in that in a volume, the volume of size of a house or something, is much smaller than it is in a similar volume of something like oil, or coal, or natural gas. And so, you have to do a lot more work in order to separate the stuff out that you want to use, or else you’re going to use the whole thing … and that’s pretty messy. But typically they separate it out. You separate out your bottles and recycle them. You separate out the glass ones and recycle that. The metals you put aside, the rocks and stones you get rid of, and then take what’s left over. So you have to do some work in order to get there, get the material into something that you can work with.

John:

Dr. Mazanec, how do people learn more about your work? How do people follow you? Do you do social media, and where can people find out more?

Terry:

Yeah, I don’t particularly do social media, but Lee Enterprises Consulting. We have a group of 180 people, like myself, with an average of 30 years of experience in all aspects of the bioeconomy. Everything from making artificial meat, to algae, to things like pyrolysis, biopolymers, all those sorts of things. And we work for clients from industry, from private life, hospitals, all sorts of different clients … investors, etc.

John:

And where can people get to you?.

Terry:

Lee-Enterprises.com.

John:

Excellent. That’s the one. Dr. Mazanec, thank you for joining us on the John Laughlin Show and providing some tremendous food for thought.

Terry:

Okay. Thanks for having me, John. Have a great one.