Company wins $4.5m in venture funds to test energy source

Every day in America, Boston energy entrepreneur Bill Davis calculates, trash gets thrown out that has enough latent energy content to generate 110,000 megawatts of electricity -- five times the typical demand for all of New England.

Now Davis's company, Ze-Gen Inc., is about to take a first small step towards proving whether that trash could be a new clean-burning electric generation source of the future. It's disclosing today it has closed on $4.5 million in venture capital funding for a New Bedford test facility.

Around the country, trash and landfills are already producing electricity. Across the country, about 90 electric generating stations, including facilities in Rochester and Saugus, burn trash to produce steam to power turbines, producing enough power for 2.3 million average homes, according to the Solid Waste Association of North America.

At hundreds of landfills, including sites in Braintree and New Bedford, methane gas seeping from decomposing trash is collected and used as the fuel source for producing electricity equal to the demand of 1.2 million homes , or 1,600 megawatts, according to the US Energy Department.

Ze-Gen has developed a different approach, which involves running carefully screened trash through a 2,700-degree pool of molten iron to break it down to basic carbon- and hydrogen-based gases. The synthetic gas, Davis said, can become a much cleaner fuel source for producing electricity than burning raw trash or burying it for years and waiting for it to decompose to methane.

With the new venture funding, Ze-Gen this month plans to open a test facility at a trash-transfer station near New Bedford Regional Airport. It will take 450 tons a day of construction debris, about 85 percent of it wood, and convert it to gas.

Theoretically, that's enough gas to produce 38 megawatts of electricity continuously, of which 8 would be used by the plant itself and the other 30 -- equal to 22,500 average-sized homes' demand -- put on the power grid. But Davis said the company plans only to test how well it can produce the gas and what toxic-waste or environmental problems present themselves. The state Department of Environmental Protection is permitting Ze-Gen to flare off, or burn, the gas for up to a year while it perfects a way to use the gas to make electricity.

"Is this going to solve our domestic energy crisis? Of course not," Davis said. "No one thing will. But this is one of the 40 or 50 things that we think you need to do."

Davis said the company is confident it can screen out toxic materials from the trash before converting it to gas, and also come up with ways to extract any dangerous toxins from the gas that is produced. The solid waste from the process is a slag-like compound that is usable as road-surface material, Davis said.

The New Bedford test facility, however, will be a way for Ze-Gen and city and state environmental protection officials to verify the process can be safe and efficient.

"You're always going to have little bits of bad stuff. Our belief is that we can capture and process those," Davis said. "In an imperfect world, this is a considerable step in the right direction, and a considerable improvement over incineration or landfilling."

Matthew A. Morrissey , executive director of the New Bedford Economic Development Council , said local officials are enthusiastic and feel the facility, as part of a trash-transfer station next to a scrap yard and capped landfill, is in an appropriate place.

"Ze-Gen is a very interesting and important company for the city. It represents a very important industry sector for us within this whole broad alternative energy space, which we are really excited about positioning New Bedford to participate in," Morrissey said.

Across Massachusetts, Davis said, enough construction debris is generated every day to fuel 20 trash-to-gas-to-electricity facilities that could each produce 30 megawatts.

That is collectively equal to the output of the Pilgrim nuclear power station in Plymouth.

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.