The New York Times business section has the story Trash Into Gas, Efficiently? An Army Test May Tell.

In a former Air Force hangar outside Sacramento, his company, Sierra Energy, has spent the last several years testing a waste-to-energy system called the FastOx Pathfinder. The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which together are known as syngas, for synthetic gas, and  can be burned to generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel.

The naivete of this report would be astounding if I hadn’t mentioned this is on the business page. Do the reporters have the technical expertise to know why this story is highly doubtful from the get go?  Actually, a college course in physics or perhaps even a high school course might give you the knowledge you need in order to raise some fundamental questions.

A chemical reaction that occurs in a blast furnace at temperatures above the combustion point of the material put into the furnace will do a fast oxidation (FastOx) that is usually called combustion.  So there may be some materials whose combustion point is higher than the temperature of the blast furnace, but most will simply combust (also known as burn, also known as incinerate).

There are something like 118 elements (maybe 102 found in nature) in the chemical periodic table.  Unless we are talking about nuclear or radioactive reactions, one element does not turn into another element.  So the output from this process may contain “hydrogen and carbon monoxide”, but it also includes 99 other elements in the same proportions by weight as were put into the blast furnace.  What do we do with those elements after the hydrogen and carbon monoxide are extracted as syngas?

To generate the heat of a blast furnace requires some kind of fuel.  There is no mention in the article of this fuel as one of the inputs.  How much will the fuel cost compared to how much economic benefit will be derived from the useful products (minus the cost of disposing of the non-useful products)?

One of the useful outputs according to the article is carbon monoxide which is usually considered a product of incomplete combustion.  In minute quantities, carbon monoxide is lethal if inhaled.  I sure hope they have some great technology to make sure none of it escapes.  (Of course, they could have meant carbon dioxide which is not directly lethal except for it being a greenhouse gas that we already are producing in excess.)

As for solving the military’s supply line problems with supplying fuel in combat situations, how is supplying the blast furnace with fuel any easier than supplying diesel or gasoline to the field?  To get the byproducts out of the blast furnace and turn it into anything that can power a tank would require some kind of technology not mentioned in this article.