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Dubai considers green fuel venture

Keach Hagey

• Last Updated: June 24. 2009 5:00PM UAE / June 24. 2009 1:00PM GMT

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CAPE TOWN // The Dubai Municipality is weeks away from signing deal with a South African, Russian and American clean energy consortium to build a facility that will turn municipal waste into transport fuel, according to the consortium’s leaders.

Representatives Earth Power Group, a joint venture between South Africa’s Centre of Material and Process Synthesis (COMPS), the Russian Academy of Sciences and Alye International, an American green energy company, say negotiations are in their final stages and the project is expected to be operational within two years.

“We consider what we are doing recycling at the molecular level,” said Virgil Perryman, the group chief executive of Alye International. “The goal is to take waste and to turn it into something useful.”

Earth Power’s method brings together several older technologies, including the Fischer-Tropschprocess, a catalyzed chemical reaction in which synthesis gas is converted into liquid hydrocarbons invented by the petroleum-poor but coal-rich Germany in the 1920s and further developed by South African Synthetic Oils (Sasol), which was founded in 1950.

COMPS, a self-funded entity within the School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering at the University of Witwatersrad, has developed a cleaner, more flexible version of this technology with lower start-up costs aimed at helping deliver fuel and electricity to the developing world, according to Dr Brendan Hausberger, the centre’s director.

“We consider this bootstraps technology,” he said. “What we are looking at is a technology where you can put in $100 million and be up and running.”

Dubai’s venture will begin with a single $25m-$30m module capable of producing between 80 and 90 tonnes of fuel per day, Mr Perryman said. “We want to increase that to 50 modules once the initial concept is well accepted,” he said.

khagey@thenational.ae