Our Vision
Our vision is to contribute to the transition towards a circular no-waste economy by developing and commercializing technology to convert all types of organic wastes such as waste biomass, plastics and/or oil wastes into valuable Hydrogen rich gas and high-quality Carbon materials.
The Technology
Background: The incentive for the technology
At present organic wastes like agricultural wastes, bio-wastes, textiles, and plastics are mainly disposed of by combustion or are dumped, e.g., in landfills. In both cases a very significant amount of Green House Gases (GHG) will be emitted like CO2, CH4, as well as emissions such as NOx, N2O, and NH3. Nitrogen pollution of ground and/or wastewater is a serious concern of current disposal methods.
Growing interest in the development of advanced waste to energy/fuels or waste to products processes have focused on pyrolysis, gasification, or hydrothermal liquefaction technologies. These technologies require some form of carbon capture process to be added to the backend of the process to achieve carbon neutral or carbon negative emissions as they typically only achieve up to 15-20% carbonization of carbon into solid carbon.
Recently Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) in the USA reported that by capturing and sequestering the CO2 emitted from burning biomass wastes in California the state could be converted into a CO2-zero emissions state at the cost of about $60 per ton CO2. This is cheaper than the costs of Direct Air Capture of CO2, which is estimated to be in the $100-200 per ton CO2 at large scale. In addition, current waste to energy/fuels or waste to products processes are energy intensive and there is a concern that they generate high volumes of hazardous waste and toxic emissions, e.g., from plastic waste recycling.
CarbonPlus: Catalytic Carbonization technology
YERRAWA’s CarbonPlus technology is a unique cost-effective Catalytic Carbonization process concept which is capable of converting organic wastes (bio-waste, agricultural wastes, manure, textiles and plastics) directly into solid carbon and hydrogen (Clean Energy) thereby avoiding the costs of capturing, transporting and sequestering CO2, while producing valuable products from the carbon like for instance carbon for soil-improvement/fertilizer, activated carbon, and even higher quality products like graphite and graphene. In addition, the CarbonPlus technology can also reduce other emissions, for instance nitrogen emissions through the ability to fix nitrogen into the solid carbon matrix.
The CarbonPlus process operates under milder conditions compared to classic thermo chemical processes, meaning at a lower pressure and temperature, and is therefore less costly and energy intensive, as well as offering a new approach by which to prevent harmful wastes being released to the environment.
The net result of the CarbonPlus technology is that organic wastes can be economically “Upcycled” while yielding negative GHG emissions as well as recovering hydrogen which is a clean energy source. The cost of reducing CO2 emissions thereby becomes negative.
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