The gasification technology has no chimney or other exit to the environment because it is a closed system. There are only two exit points. One for the ash - the residue of the thermal degradation from the pyrolysis chamber, - and the other for the syngas to be led to the end product unit.

The external heating uses the syngas produced by the gasification unit. Depending upon the energy content of the feed material used, the operating syngas is about between 10-30 % of the syngas quantity produced.

Applying this technology we may provide a financially viable, environmental friend solution not only the MSW, or other “green energy” sources, but even regarding the application of the fossil energy sources to meet the energy demand.

Although there is a huge quantity of fossil energy source materials even in Europe, we don’t mine and use them, but we are importing these materials to meet the daily energy needs, and make huge effort to increase the ratio of green energy production, in the total energy consumption of Europe.

The politicians and the most of the experts think, that the coal and the fossil energy source materials are the main enemies of the environment, and cause the biggest part of the GHG emission. Thanks to this approach, the EU has begun a dramatic fight against the fossil energy sources, mostly against the coal mines and coal-fired power plants.

During the last 20 years some very important steps were done on this rout. The EU governments step-by-step decreased - and later withdrawn - the subsidies, with that they supported the home mining industry, against the cheap coals of the world market. (Regulation (EC) No 1407/2002); (COUNCIL DECISION of 10 December 2010 on State aid to facilitate the closure of uncompetitive coal mines (2010/787/EU)) Later on, the not “economically operated” mines were closed, and the CO2 quota system was led into the practice.

According to industry experts, unless coal emissions are phased out within the next 15 years, we will not meet the targets for carbon reduction as promised in the Paris Agreement last year. Although coal output is falling by approximately 1% per year overall, it still accounts for a quarter of all energy produced in Europe, and a fifth of its greenhouse gas emissions. The new agreement, which has been signed by 26 European states, announced that all coal-fired plants will be completely replaced by 100% carbon neutral sources by the year 2050.

The coal industry though was sceptical about the utilities’ announcement. “When we see a new energy system – with lots of energy storage – that works at an affordable price, then coal, oil and gas will not be needed. In the meantime, we still rely on conventional sources.”

Consequently it is all the same, if we use European or Australian coal the harmful gases and elements are continuously emitted, because the technology is not “zero emission one”.

Another major question is grid expansion, which is far behind schedule and quite expensive. Due to the EEG subsidy for renewable power and the decline in coal and CO2-certificate prices, wholesale electricity prices have fallen to very low levels and while coal is still needed to guarantee security of supply, more and more coal-fired power plants can no longer operate profitably.

This has led to the notice of the fact, that all the coal-fired plants cannot be closed for supply security reasons, thus underlining the importance of coal-fired power plants.

For this supply security reason, minimum of 10-25% of the total electricity consumption has to be generated by coal fired - or other schedulable, controllable and adjustable technology based - power plants, because the green energy sources are not 100% controllable, due to their high dependence from such environmental effects, like the wind and the solar insolation are.

This list of countries by electric energy consumption is mostly based on The World Factbook

(Table 1 from Wikipedia)

This huge energy consumption and the electricity demands of other developing regions of the World makes an almost insurmountable problem, mostly if the GHG emission must be decreased radically, and we don’t have “Zero Emission Technology” to replace the traditional “combustion”.

The above mentioned security reason is only one issue, but several others also mean difficult problem against the exclusive application of the wind and solar energy generation technologies. Like the limited availability of the land area in the EU. Although the efficiency of the solar panels was continuously growing during the last decade, there is needed an unbelievable great land area for the solar panels to provide the electric energy consumption.

Figure 1

It is no doubt that these technologies are playing very important role in the green energy production and in the environmental protecting, but as it was mentioned above their risk rates are much higher - due to the “circumstance effects” - , consequently the electricity consumption, and the production must not be based exclusively on these technologies.