By el Greco, special to Fog City Journal
April 22, 2008
Now, I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool shop-a-holic, but in my conversations with such people I am told that one of the moments of sheer shopping ecstasy is finding a great deal. I’ve been told tales of serious shoppers who will hunt and search and explore stores in an effort to get the best deal on a particular item. It doesn’t matter to the real shopper whether the item costs pennies or thousands of dollars-it’s getting that great deal and knowing you got the best price possible.
This might all be news to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.
Among the many routine tasks our fair city must attend to is one that is delicately referred to as “sludge hauling”. Sludge is what’s leftover when the city’s sewage treatment plants are done treating…well, treating the stuff they treat. When it’s done, they call it sludge and since a city the size of San Francisco creates a lot of sludge, it’s gotta go somewhere. In the vast majority of cities, sludge ends up in a landfill and to get it there requires trucks to haul it.
This is where the Board of Supervisors comes in. Every so often, the city puts out the sludge hauling contract for bids and the folks that like doing that kind of work bid on it. Normally, a city wants to get the best price they can for this nasty but necessary service. I say normally (and you know where this is going) but this being San Francisco and all, our Supervisors didn’t feel that getting the best deal was all that important. In fact, they felt that it was so unimportant that they approved a contract with a bidder that was $3 million dollars over the lowest bidder’s price.
Editor’s Note: Supervisor Chris Daly was the only supervisor to oppose the “sludge fund” contract.
Without getting into all the nuances of public contracting, this is plain ridiculous and even more so when the City is facing a $200 million shortfall next year. You’d think that this would be the time to try to save some money and not spend more than you have to.
Sure, the high bidder, Norcal Waste, has been doing San Francisco’s sludge hauling for years. But the low bidder, S&S Hauling, has been doing the same work in other cities for a long time as well. I did a little bit of checking and sure enough, Norcal and its unions have been known to make some political contributions to some of our elected officials. I’m not saying any of our elected representatives have been bought and it’s not like this doesn’t go on all the time, I’m just saying, well, $3 million is a lot of money when there’s no real need to pay it. Hell, I understand that Kamala Harris needs about that much to pay back the Feds for bogus grant money her department never should have received.
Now, here’s a truly interesting tidbit that I don’t think our Supervisors have considered. By using an existing green technology that has been around for decades, it might not even be necessary to haul one pound of sludge to the landfill. I’m talking about what engineers call “biomass gasification” and this being Earth Day, it’s a real good time to talk about it.
Biomass gasification has been used for years all around the world. The technology to do it is basically off the shelf equipment that you can get right now. The R&D was done years ago and it’s proven that it works.
Biomass is organic material such as sludge or plants or wood chips or any other organic material that is normally thrown away. When burned, biomass doesn’t release the large amounts of energy that, say coal or oil do, so utility sized power plants have not historically used it. But when you heat biomass at low temperatures (this is called pyrolysis for any chemistry nuts), it releases gases that with a little tweaking can be burned just like natural gas. This so-call syn-gas can be used to drive turbines and generators that make electricity. Are you with me? With biomass gasification, sludge can be used to make electricity. And San Francisco has all the sludge we could use.
Now biomass gasification from sludge is not going to power all of San Francisco by any stretch of the imagination. But it could be enough to power the entire City College campus, or the new super green California Academy of Sciences (cool, huh?). Once the City has bought the equipment, the electricity is nearly free as long as we keep flushing our toilets. And the sludge hauling contract? Not even needed.
It gets even better when you consider the carbon “cap and trade” laws that will be coming both at the state and federal levels. Biomass gasification will generate “carbon credits” that can be sold to whoever wants them and we end up getting paid to make electricity from sludge.
There’s really no question, from a technological, economic, and environmental perspective, biomass gasification makes a lot of sense.
My question is this: Why isn’t the City looking into this green energy source instead of spending the extra $3 million on political favors?
el Greco, bon vivant and ne’er do well, is a hack writer living in
el Greco
The Hunger Site
April 22, 2008 at 7:56 pm
The City of Stamford Wastewater Pollution Control Authority located in Stamford CT, is presently performing pilot scale testing on the subject and has plans of constructing a 10 MW gasification facility at the Treatment Plant Site. Stamford is leading the way in a technology that uses a waste product and a truly renewable energy resource. Their success has the potential to change the way wastewater residuals are managed on a global basis, uncover a reliable enconomic fuel source, and reduce carbon emissions. Why haul it, burn it, or bury it, when you can move it to the revenue side of your P&L?