Two plants in Idaho could turn 250 tons of trash a day into power for 10,000 homes

Two plants in Idaho could turn 250 tons of trash a day into power for 10,000 homes




Landfills across the country are filling up and the march is on to increase renewable energy sources. Ada County buries about 2,000 tons of trash every day at its Foothills landfill — trash that Eagle businessman Lloyd Mahaffey sees as fuel just waiting to become clean electricity.


“Burying our waste is the second-dumbest thing humans do,” said Mahaffey, CEO of Dynamis Energy, which already has built a plant to turn trash into power in Alaska. (The No. 1 dumbest thing, he said, is always up for debate.)

Burying trash leaves a mountainous mess for future generations and the decomposing trash puts harmful methane gas into the air.

“Every ton of waste stream we process is one ton the county doesn’t have to bury,” Mahaffey said.

Now Dynamis hopes its first two plants in the Lower 48 with its new technology will be built this year in Ada County and in Clark County in eastern Idaho.

Dynamis Energy says its process can reduce tons of trash in eight hours into a small pile of ash and a gas that can be converted into energy.

“People say they don’t want an incinerator in their back yard. That’s good, because that’s not what we make,” said Mahaffey. “This technology is gasification, not incineration.”

Instead of burning the waste, he says, it is heated in a chamber without oxygen. That breaks down the material into elements that form a gas, which can be burned to spin turbines and create energy.

About 95 percent of the waste is destroyed by the process.

“We will have very little residual material going into the landfill, if any,” said Dynamis vice president Pete Johnson.

They say their technology leapfrogs previous attempts to turn trash into power. Even advanced incinerators produce emissions that must be “scrubbed” by an expensive process.

Thermal gasification differs because the waste is super-heated, not burned.

“It is kind of like Dutch-oven cooking,” said Johnson.

Dynamis said its air-testing results for particulates, carbon monoxide, mercury, dioxin and other harmful chemicals are well below federal, California, European and Canadian standards.

In 2010, 86 waste-to-energy plants operated in 24 states with the capacity to process more than 97,000 tons of municipal waste per day, according to a report from the Energy Recovery Council in Washington, D.C. Nearly all of these plants were built in the 1980s and 1990s.

Dynamis’ technology destroys more types of waste — tires, medical waste and plastics, all materials difficult to store or destroy — and does it more cleanly. But there was little interest from other municipalities to utilize the process. Landfills have been cheap and easy solutions for getting rid of garbage.

But now several factors are generating more interest in waste-to-energy plants.

Landfills are filling up and it is no longer economically feasible to build new ones. Technology is becoming cleaner and cheaper. And there’s new demand and government incentives for renewable energy.

Mahaffey bought the company about two years ago and relocated it to Eagle from Iowa. He said Dynamis is also working on design and engineering for a plant in Italy and another in Central America.

Design, engineering and most of the manufacturing take place in the Treasure Valley.

Mahaffey says gasification technology could be especially suited for areas where burying trash is difficult, such as islands, which have limited space, and northern climates where permafrost prevents the burying and decomposition of trash.

Waste-generated energy has an advantage over wind and solar, he says, because trash offers a stable fuel supply, unlike fickle wind or sunshine.