Recycled Energy Development (RED) will reduce greenhouse gases profitably through the development and ownership of energy recycling facilities. RED captures industrial waste energy to produce electricity and thermal power, often without burning any additional fuel or emitting any additional pollution. For industrial partners, RED reduces energy costs substantially, increases reliability, and offers the opportunity for emissions credits.

RED seeks to take advantage of the opportunities presented by today’s inefficient and unreliable electricity system. The average U.S. power plant was built in 1964, using technology from the 1950s, and two-thirds of the fuel burned to generate electricity is lost. Unreliable supplies—the result of blackouts or temporary surges—annually cost consumers $150 billion, adding a 40-percent surcharge to energy costs. Power plants also are the nation’s largest polluters, spewing tons of mercury, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and other contaminants into America’s air and waters. RED will provide more efficient, reliable, and clean energy.

A weapon against global warming

Recycling industrial waste energy enables RED to tackle a major challenge of our time—global warming—while reducing energy costs for our customers and creating profits for our investors. Greenhouse gas reduction and profitability are mutually sacrosanct to our business. Without the former, we leave the world a worse place than we found it. Without the latter, we won’t grow.

Industrial waste energy recycling offers enormous potential. RED has identified more than $100 billion of U.S. projects, and another $250 billion of potential combined heat and power projects that displace boiler fuel with recycled waste heat from the electric generating process.

Opportunities to recycle waste energy

A variety of industrial waste energy streams can be recycled into useful heat and power. These include hot exhaust gases, low-grade fuels (some of which are typically flared), and high-pressure steam and gas. Proven technology can profitably convert the energy in hot exhaust (600 degrees F or higher) from any process into steam that drives turbine generators and produces electricity. Coke ovens, glass furnaces, silicon production, refineries, natural gas pipeline compressors, petrochemical processes, and many processes in the metals industry vent hot exhaust that can be profitably recycled to produce fuel-free power.

Another way to recycle waste energy is by burning presently flared gas from blast furnaces, refineries, or chemical processes to produce steam and electricity. Factories producing carbon black (used in tire manufacturing) typically waste enough flared gas to produce three times their electrical needs.

The energy potential in pressurized gases also can be recycled into electricity. Examples of pressurized gas include steam, process exhaust, and compressed natural gas in pipelines. Gas pressure drop can be converted to mechanical energy with expanders, which then drive an electric generator. Many industrial producers generate streams of high-pressure gas that can power a backpressure turbine connected to an electric generator in order to produce fuel-free power, with zero pollution.

For example, most industrial and commercial boiler plants were designed to generate steam at high pressures to pack the distribution pipes. This approach allows the plant to install smaller distribution pipes, reducing first cost. These plants then deflate steam pressure at points of use by means of valves. A backpressure turbine can convert the pressure drop into fuel-free power. Nearly every college and university campus, as well as most industrial complexes, could produce some fuel-free power from steam pressure drop with a backpressure turbine generator.

Gas transmission pipelines burn approximately 8 percent of the gas being transported to drive compressors that pack the remaining natural gas into transcontinental pipes. The gas pressure is then reduced at each city gate with valves, typically wasting the potential energy of the pressure drop. Gas expanders can recycle this pressure drop at the points of gas flow into local distribution systems. Capturing this natural gas pressure drop across the United States would require roughly $8-10 billion of new investment and would result in 6,500 megawatts of clean energy. The resulting generation would produce roughly 28 trillion kilowatt-hours per year of fuel-free power with zero pollution. At present, we know of only two locations in North America that capture this opportunity. To achieve a comparable amount of clean energy would require 22,000 megawatts of new solar collectors (at a current capital cost of $130-170 billion) or 6-7 nuclear plants.

Many industrial processes—such as catalytic crackers at petroleum refineries and blast furnaces at steel mills—also emit hot exhaust at above atmospheric pressure. Top-gas recovery turbines could produce 15 to 35 megawatts of fuel-free power at every blast furnace and every oil refinery. The overwhelming majority of U.S. blast furnaces and oil refineries currently waste this potential clean energy due to their focus on their “core business” and corresponding underinvestment in energy assets.

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