Newswise — On August 3, 2015, President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency announced the Clean Power Plan—a historic and important step in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s coal-burning power plants. Called by Obama “the biggest, most important step we’ve ever taken to combat climate change,” the plan will require states to meet specific carbon emission reduction standards based on their individual energy consumption. According to the White House, the plan sets standards to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Gina McCarthy, administrator of the EPA, said the plan would cost a total of $8.4 billion with total benefits expected to be $34 billion to $54 billion.
Two weeks later, the President followed up by proposing the first federal limits on methane emissions from oil wells and other parts of the oil and natural gas system. The proposed measures would cut methane emissions by 20 to 30 percent from measures leveled in 2012 by forcing and encouraging oil and gas companies to find and repair gas leaks, capture gas seeping from completed wells, and limit emissions from pumps, compressor stations and other facilities. They would also curtail the emission of volatile organic compounds.
Pushback to the new standards is expected from industry leaders who believe that the restrictions will negatively impact business. However, some believe that technological innovation might allow industry to go green without compromising profits. Among these is Alain Castro, CEO of Ener-Core, Inc., the world’s only provider of commercialized Power Oxidation technology and equipment that generates clean power from low-quality and waste gases from a wide variety of industries.
Ener-Core’s Power Oxidizer, which has already been commercialized and installed successfully, and has also been issued 19 patents to date, converts waste gases such as low-BTU methane into useful heat and power. These are typically gases that are flared (burned) off by a wide range of industries, as the gases are considered useless (and hence waste) because current power technologies cannot use them as a fuel. By making these low-quality gases “useful,” Ener-Core provides a compelling value proposition, enabling the industries to earn an attractive return on investment and gain a competitive edge by reducing their costs of operations.
Today, there are approximately three million industrial facilities (spanning many industries) that collectively emit 32 percent of the total global greenhouse emissions, and all these industrial facilities combined actually purchase approximately $800 billion of energy per year from their local utilities in order to operate their facilities. Ener-Core can enable these industrial companies to convert their emissions into useful energy that they can use on-site, thereby enabling them to lower their operating costs by reducing the amount of energy they need to purchase. By enabling industries to convert their waste gases into energy, the industrial facilities can earn an attractive return on investment, and gain a competitive edge by reducing their costs of operations. This technology has already been deployed commercially, and the company is now ramping up in collaboration with the leading global manufacturers of gas turbines and industrial steam boilers. Ener-Core recently announced the receipt of a $2.1 million purchase order and initial license payment from Dresser-Rand, a Siemens company, for two units of Ener-Core’s next-generation Power Oxidizers, to be integrated with Dresser-Rand’s KG2-3G gas turbine.
Once the clean emissions standards really take hold, more companies that currently generate gases such as low-quality methane may be looking to adopt new technology to remain profitable. Ener-Core’s Power Oxidizers might play a key role in this transition. The EPA mandates encourage companies to do what is right for our planet—but investing in technology that may ultimately help drive profits might be a win-win solution.
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