Lockheed Martin’s Attempt To Generate Electricity From Waste


09/28/2016

Bio-energy is to power Lockheed Martin’s Owego plant.


Dailycsr.com – 28 September 2016 - Lockheed Martin is working hard for turning “actual trash into useable clean energy”. Amid manufacturing helicopters for the military and “space-flight gear”, Lockheed Martin, in its New York based, Owego facility, the company extended a hand of partnership with Concord Blue which is based out of Germany. The said partnership is attempting to render two hundred fifty kilowatt “advanced gasification plant” functional which will be capable of converting “3,650 tons of bio waste into electricity” required for the facility on a yearly basis.
 
The process of converting waste into energy works in two ways, in the first way the bio waste is burnt directly, while in the second way the solid waste is heated until it turns into a gas which is ten converted into “synthetic fuel”.
 
In Lockheed Martin’s Owega facility, the company eventually wants to build a “sorting facility” which will use municipal waste that usually turn into landfills and segregate the recyclable materials from there and convert the rest of the “biomass to fuel” through “Concord Blue's Reformer technology”. According to Lockheed, the biomass heated within an environment without oxygen within its facility, “far exceeds environmental requirements”.
 
As of now, the same plant has already brought down its carbon-emissions by “9,000 metric tons” on an annual basis, in addition to the recycling of “discarded wood chips” that are collected from the “nearby lumber mills” and turned into “fuel for a wood-fired biomass system”.
 
At first, the practice of wood burning may sound “like a downright low-tech solution”, while “Lockheed claims this locally sourced energy is carbon-neutral and has saved the facility $1 million per year in heating and cooling costs.”
 
Furthermore, there are other plans of the company, whereby it is also “working to install a small-scale version of the system at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in upstate New York, enabling the hospital to provide its own heat and power”.
 
Besides making its own facilities carbon neutral, Lockheed Martin, in collaboration with Concord Blue, is building a five mega-watt of bio-fuel power plant, in Germany’s Herten, which will have the capacity to “convert 50,000 tons of feedstock into power for 5,000 homes and businesses”.
 
 
 
 
 
 
References:
www.engadget.com