That will have double duty. Burn sludge and garbage. Why is this so hard?

lattitude58, let them walk their talk....

Before we lurch forward with an attempt to solve a problem that is derived from the then new whiz-bang, high-tech treatment plant adjacent to the Mendenhall River, could we go look back and find out who the decision makes that brought us the problem in the first place?

The current head of Public Works was not part of the decision making team and it is good to see someone advocating for a deliberate and cautious approach when addressing this situation.

"We should let private businesses take all of the responsibility and risk for what CBJ should be doing, but isn't."

When some company comes to Juneau promoting a new technology that has never been successfully deployed before for this purpose at this scale, and asks us to pay just "an estimated $8 million to $9 million", we ought to be very, very skeptical. Kudos to the Public Works director.

If their technology works as claimed, they're sitting on a gold mine. The need for new sewage treatment technologies is huge worldwide. They will make billions.

So let them take all of the risk. Or let them find venture capitalists (perhaps Romney's interested) to fund this prototype. If they already have big backers like Rockwell, let them pony up the cash. There's absolutely no reason for Juneau to pay the cost of being someone's science experiment (unless we get an equity stake in the outcome).

Is Juneau sludge a problem? Sure. But that's no reason to rush headlong into throwing millions into speculative, half-baked solutions.

All of Latitude58's points are completely logical if you don't actually think about it at all or actually consider real economics and financial principles. First Venture Capitalists don't touch any investment without a likely minimum return of 50% or more. That never includes public-benefits capital projects. And if they did, who would incur the cost of that return? Oh, maybe the rate payers on their wastewater bill to fund the astronomical disposal contract. If the $8 or $9 million seems too high, fix the incinerator (Oooh, $20 million PLUS $1 million annual O&M might sting a bit). Furthermore, it doesn't matter who ponies up the money on public-benefits projects, the risks will all be passed along in the contract along with the costs. If private interests do it, the city is actually going to pay more (A LOT MORE). The disposal fees to are going to include O&M PLUS Capitalization PLUS Debt Service PLUS Profit (enough to cover any risk and then some). And nobody is going to build it privately without an irrevocable disposal contract and likely hefty tax incentives. All of the risk would be offset by the profit. So the private interests will actually incur no risk, but Juneau-ites would incur a stinging bill. The only thing that CBJ gets out of a truly private venture is higher (MUCH HIGHER) garbage and sewer costs that will be passed along to the taxpayers and effectively no control over the process. CBJ had opportunities to own and control both the dump and Snettisham. How are those decisions working out for the citizenry of Juneau? We get a new, toxic ski hill in Lemon Creek and a five-fold electric bill increase ever time we get heavy snow. Hmmmm, who is footing the bill on those risks? They are being 100% passed along by AEL&P and Waste Management to the rate payers. But hey, pay now or pay later.

@Latitude58

WOW!

"vaporware"???!!!

"they're simply hucksters"???!!!

Get sued much?

If you think my pretty mild comments above are "incendiary", then you haven't spent much time on this forum.

You appear to be one of the project stakeholders, though you haven't identified yourself as such. And already you're trotting out the threat of lawyers over trivial statements on a comment board? Really now.

Tell me: Is this technology currently being used to treat the total sludge output from any other sewage plants the size of Juneau's? No? Then that meets my definition of vaporware - grand promises about a system that doesn't yet exist. Ever hear of Microsoft?

Like I said - I hope it pans out. The world needs this technology. But there are tried & true options that have far less risk for Juneau available today. Duncan is being prudent with my tax dollars. I think that's entirely appropriate.

Suggestion: Go to the hog industry. They have massive sewage disposal problems. Install a small system in a few hog feed lots to demonstrate the proof of concept. The only one that would need convincing is the owner of the lot. Much simpler and cleaner than trying to sell a one-off to a municipality. Come back after a couple years of documented success - our poop will still be here waiting.

Here at Lammergeier CleanTech, we have been intently watching the bantering, name calling, innuendos, accusations, and disinformation in this forum regarding costs, effectiveness, and maturity of our proposed technology. Hopefully the dust has settled enough for a civil discussion. Honestly, given the unanimously positive feedback we received from the Rotary and Chamber of Commerce, we are shocked and dismayed by the negativity toward our proposed solution in this news forum. So we have a few points to clarify with actual facts.

1) FACT: Kirk Duncan called us for assistance after Public Works attempt to go with composting went sideways and as he noted, we have discussed various business approaches in rather broad strokes with only rough estimates. The city and Mr. Duncan’s predecessor failed to plan for the all-to-predictable end of our sludge incinerator’s 20-year projected life. So Mr. Duncan is now saddled with an emergency, with which he and his staff are trying to contend. Failure to plan on Public Works’ part does in this case constitute an emergency on the part of the community as a whole. We have been working to clarify the city's needs regarding this issue for well over a year now, starting well before Mr. Duncan's involvement. But there has been no serious discussion up to now on any specific business model, and we are happy to crunch the numbers in detail as soon as the city settles on a business model. It is really up to the community to say what they want.

2) FACT: We are a small local, Juneau-based company with considerable expertise and familiarity with the proposed technology. That is the main reason why we are promoting this option here first. If Juneau isn't interested, that's fine. But somebody needs to explicitly make that decision for specific, accurate, legitimate reasons other than vague, notional assertions that it seems “too new” and "seems" theoretical to them. We are trying to help our own community. But a couple blowhards yelling denigrating remarks from the anonymity and actually insignificant armchair obscurity of a news forum should not be the voices for the community as a whole. This should be a community discussion and decision.

3) FACT: The proposed technology is neither new, theoretical, experimental, nor is it a prototype. Saying otherwise is a complete mischaracterization based on either ignorance or malice. It is simply hot water (really hot water) and oxygen. It's not rocket science, but it is science. We are not even in the realm of exotic when you compare us to plasma. By today’s standards, we are not even high-tech. We are just a pressure cooker with small tubes, high-pressure pumps, heat, and steam turbines. Adding the steam turbines is the only relatively new part of the system. This system is actually less complex than Juneau's existing (albeit broken) sludge incinerator. There are numerous such real-life systems in use for wet waste destruction all over the world with capacities much larger and much smaller than Juneau’s sludge volume. There are even a few units specifically for sludge disposal including the demo unit being used for a real-world application from our partner company in Ireland, which coincidentally would be roughly the size of the unit for Juneau. The technology has been in use for over three decades in the chemical and oil industries and is now one of the primary ways that the U.S. Department of Defense destroys dangerous munitions such as chemical and biological weapons. It was used at Fort Greeley here in Alaska for that very purpose. Taken these actual facts together, we are always taken aback by the untrue allegations and accusations that the technology is “new” and “untested”. The process generates lots of heat, thus the logical recent add-on of steam turbines for electrical production. All we are doing is using that heat to make steam to turn those turbines. So we are using thirty-year-old, well-established waste destruction technology to drive ubiquitous technology that was first developed as a toy 2,000 years ago. So characterizing the technology as new is laughable. By any conventional standard, this technology is actually ancient. In fact the technology is a variation on the way coffee beans are Organically decaffeinated and a variant of newer solvent-free dry cleaning (which now has 25% of the dry cleaning market).

Everybody in Juneau should watch the Discovery Channel video that features our system, which shows the actual, functioning demonstration facility:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obYCioptaRw.

We didn’t produce the video, the Discovery Channel did. The full Discovery Channel episode can be downloaded from iTunes. Juneau-ites can then decide for themselves whether or not our approach should be vetted as a reasonable solution to Juneau's sludge problem. Of note: one comment in this forum stated that there have been 60 sewage-sludge fluidized-bed incinerators built. The number is actually closer to 50, and Juneau’s incinerator was one of the first built for that purpose. So there aren’t many that have been adapted to sludge and Juneau has an early model.

4) FACT: Every component for our proposed system is straight off the shelf from the oil and chemical industries. Wanna see the pumps? Here are the ones we use:

http://www.feluwa.de/en/process-technology/multisafe-double-hose-diaphra....

They are definitely sophisticated and robust, operating in brutal conditions such as mines and oil fields maintenance-free for 10,000 hours, but not particularly high-tech. Feluwa is a major pump builder for the wastewater industry and have been building pumps for over a hundred years. Beyond the pumps, our system is really just a bunch of small tubes operating at high pressures and high temperatures.

5) FACT: Rockwell Automation and Parsons are the engineering firms with whom we partner in order to build the system. They are not our backers, financially or otherwise. But they would be key players in bringing this solution to Juneau.

6) FACT: Dumping the sludge in the landfill dramatically exacerbates the stench problems and generates heavily toxified leachate that in turn is taken to the Mendenhall WW plant and poisons the WW treatment process. There was a person at the Chamber meeting who asserted that the city is now shipping all of its sludge south. We have not heard that information directly from the city. The most-recent information we have is that the city is shipping all sludge from the Juneau-Douglas (Thane) wastewater plant, and all of the sludge from the Mendenhall and Auke Bay plants was going into the landfill. When we asserted to Public Works that such a practice is just a bandaid, Public Works told us “we can put the sludge into the landfill for thirty years and have no problem doing it”. We disagree and as concerned Juneau-ites feel that continuing that practice is at best a disservice to the community and bad public policy. We feel the community should drive the decision regarding that practice.

7) FACT: Sewage sludge is classified as both a harmful pollutant and infectious biohazard and has been identified as a potential reservoir source for bioterrorism. The Centers for Disease control have new post-9/11 shipping regulations that require all infectious agents be sealed in safe containment vessels with serious implications for failure to comply. Open-top shipping containers full of sludge loaded on barges also used for transporting food and household goods bound for Seattle do not meet the letter or spirit of federal CDC regulations for shipping infectious materials.

8) FACT: Plasma incineration is successfully used at large scale in many places. Juneau is simply too small for plasma, and unless there is a major breakthrough and somebody rewrites the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we will always be too small for plasma to be anything other than an energy hog for our scale. It will actually consume energy at Juneau's scale, and wet wastes exacerbate that problem. Water is the enemy of all dry combustion processes, whether you are talking about a campfire, internal combustion engine, or plasma incinerator. Plasma incineration, just like any other incineration process, is stymied by water because you have to boil off the water to incinerate the sludge solids. Sludge is 90% water (or more), and traditional, high-efficiency incinerators require about one cup of diesel fuel (plus about 0.5 kwh of electricity) to boil off every gallon of water entrained in the sludge. That is a cost of about $0.40 per gallon of sludge, and Juneau generates about 1.8 million gallons of sludge annually extracted from 1.5 billion gallons of sewage. The bottom-line energy requirements for plasma incineration are the same as traditional incineration, you just use massively higher amounts of electricity. Note that we don't boil off any water in our process. Plus, plasma incineration is kind of like rocket science. The hard part is having the insulation hold up to the extreme heat. At plasma’s 25,000 degrees Fahrenheit, every substance known to man melts. So it is difficult and exceptionally expensive to build a machine that holds up to those conditions. We operate at a much more modest temperature of under 1,000 degrees, comparable to a typical car engine.

9) FACT: Our proposed technology is for wet wastes, not for general, mixed municipal wastes. So our proposed system handles liquids and slurries, including highly toxic organic chemicals. The system could handle things like paper and plastic if they were ground up into tiny pieces and slurried with water. But our system is really not designed for that purpose. So, using our technology for garbage is doable, but it's definitely not recommended. The proposed technology is an excellent solution, however, to deal with the liquid portion of Juneau's hazardous waste disposal and would be a straightforward method for disposal of fats, oils, and greases. You can, for example, mix waste motor oil with water, and this system will destroy the oil for you and leave you with clean water. It's not magic, it's science. It's not a science project, it's a fully engineered system. It's clean. It's good business. It's a real solution. It's available right now. And it's a good fit for Juneau. But ultimately that is a decision for the community as a whole to make.

10) FACT: We are happy to address any questions that anybody cares to pose in any civil forum, public or private.

@ L58

I cannot agree with you more. Everybody in a democracy gets to put their spin on their ideas and agendas. But public forums are where we are supposed to make debate our decisions as part of our ostensibly open, sunshine-oriented system. Obviously, our form of government is by far the worst, except for all the others (apologies to Mr. Churchill).

Yes, there are a lot of communities that are victims of hucksters and worse. The example to which I was referring clearly falls in the "worse" category. The guys involved in the Chicago debacle are not what you would call desirable corporate partners. Blind greed drives a lot of problems.

As for Lemon Creek, it is hard to say what is going on there. I know the city was dumping most of sludge there, while shipping part of it to Oregon. There is now some question as to what is actually being done with it. That seems like a question that should be directly and clearly answered by someone (Duncan? Kiefer? Botelho? I dunno?, but someone). You are absolutely right. That time bomb will likely eventually be the biggest cost Juneau. Who's going to get stuck with that bill when WM walks away? Who is going to get stuck with the bill for the lawsuit when we eventually find our community trying to hold somebody's feet to the fire in court? That will be a losing proposition. The damage will already be done. Avoiding a mess is almost always easier than cleaning it up, but it requires public policy leaders with a vision and a backbone. I'm dubious that we have that here regarding the landfill.

Yes, actions do speak louder than words. But the company response above seems to at least speak to some of the concerns you have raised.

I don't know that it is the role of any public official to "resist pressure". That smacks of being dogmatic and non-responsive (may be an apt description in this example). Rather it is their role to respond to public demands by thoughtfully analyzing the problem, clearly stating concerns in a logical, metered manner, and setting budget priorities. As I recall, Mr. Swope very publicly called for assistance from the public and local businesses for ideas to solve this problem and did so in multiple media outlets.

Microsoft: yep, I agree. Not the best products in the world. When you say Microsoft or Apple 100 years from now, most people will probably say "Who?". Nobody will even remember Steve Jobs. But Bill and Melinda Gates will likely have statues erected in their honor all over the Third World.

We will further clarify.

1) "Emergency": Rod Swope's words not ours.

2) Not new technology. Well-established hazardous, wet-waste destruction technology applied to a much easier application than it that for which it has been extensively used for three decades.

3) We've offered to buy CBJ officials tickets to Ireland. They declined.

4) Thanks.

5) Agree.

6) 700 shipping containers (20-footer to be accurate) was solely for a perspective on the shear volume of Juneau's sludge. We did not mean to indicate that the entire volume is being shipped to Oregon. Although someone at the Chamber meeting said that was now the case. To be clear it was a PW staffer who made the 30 years comment. Mr. Duncan indicated no objection to the comment at the time or since. We also hope you are correct that PW's intent doesn't match the statement. We would like to hear that stated publicly.

7) Bioterrorism concern? Absolutely. You bet. We didn't make that determination. The feds did. Rules are rules and regs are regs. Those regs were specifically written to address interstate shipping when materials are easier to go missing. That is the very situation that we have here. We didn't write the regs. The Coast Guard thinks such threats enough of a concern to escort 100s of cruise ships every year in SEAK. Don't like the rules? Ask the CDC for an exception. We expect them to be enforced and expect CBJ to abide by them. Being unaware of this regs would be the stake in the heart of credibility.

8) 85% to 90% moisture content is where you at after sludge has been dewatered with high-efficiency presses. Raw sludge prior to dewatering can be 99% water.

9) There are many ways to approach a problem. As long as the process by which a public decision is reached is an open process with clear analyses, it is fine with us.

10) We speak for ourselves. Whatever private citizens may or may not say in support or in opposition to our proposal is their business.

To create heat and energy that would have kept Lemon Creek from Vanderbilt to Mapco thawed out all winter long using garbage as the fuel source. With the Rock Dump sludge burner going offline later, the fuel source would be expanded. His plan was poo-pooed by CBJ. Looks pretty good, now that we are looking at funding newer technology from our own coffers. When Tonsgaard sold out the dump, the city should have seen the writing on the wall. Now, Shorty can say, "I told you so!".