STATE OF NEW YORK : COUNTY OF ROCKLAND TOWN OF … › userfiles › file › Minutes from 1_8_15...
Transcript of STATE OF NEW YORK : COUNTY OF ROCKLAND TOWN OF … › userfiles › file › Minutes from 1_8_15...
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
1
STATE OF NEW YORK : COUNTY OF ROCKLANDTOWN OF STONY POINT : PLANNING BOARD- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - X IN THE MATTER OF NEW PLANET SUSTAINABLE FUELS
JOINT PUBLIC INFORMATIONAL MEETING- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - X
James A. Farley Elementary School Thursday January 8, 2015 7:00 p.m.
PLANNING MEMBERS:THOMAS GUBITOSA, CHAIRMANPETER MULLER, VICE-CHAIRMANEUGENE KRAESE, BOARD MEMBERERIC JASLOW, BOARD MEMBERGERRY ROGERS, BOARD MEMBERMICHAEL FERGUSON, BOARD MEMBER
TOWN BOARD MEMBERS:GEOFFREY FINN, SUPERVISORKARL JAVENES, COUNCILMANJAMES WHITE, COUNCILMANTHOMAS BASILE, COUNCILMANJAMES MONAGHAN, COUNCILMANDOUGLAS J. JOBSON, DISTRICT 1 LEGISLATOR
ROCKLAND & ORANGE REPORTING 2 Congers Road New City, New York 10956 (845) 634-4200
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
2
1 APPEARANCES:
2 JOHN FURST, ESQ., Special Counsel Planning BoardSTEPHEN MANDRACCHIA, ESQ., Co-Counsel for Applicant
3 GARY R. SMITH, New Planet Sustainable FuelsJOHN CRUIKSHANK, New Planet Sustainable Fuels
4 THOMAS YONGE, PE, Golder AssociatesCHRISTOPHER J. DOHERTY, TRI, Inc.
5 SHAWN FREITAS, TRI, Inc.MARY PAGANO, Clerk to the Planning Board
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17 ROCKLAND & ORANGE REPORTING 2 Congers Road
18 New City, New York 10956 (845) 634-4200
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
3
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 SUPERVISOR FINN: Good evening,
3 everyone. If I could just have your
4 attention for a few moments before we start.
5 First, let me introduce myself. I'm
6 Supervisor Finn from the Town of Stony Point.
7 I just want to take this opportunity to say
8 thank you for coming out on this cold,
9 wintery night here. I know it's really
10 brutal out there tonight, but everyone is
11 here because we all care about our community.
12 We want what's best for our community.
13 This is an informational meeting that
14 we're going to learn a lot about this plant
15 tonight. We're going to listen and we're
16 going to respect the men and women who are
17 going to speak here tonight. We're not going
18 to have any yelling from the crowd. We're
19 not going to have any of that. This is going
20 to be a very respectful meeting.
21 I have to thank first and foremost the
22 North Rockland School District, Paul Rooney
23 and everyone on the board for making this
24 happen here tonight at Farley School. So we
25 thank you so much for that.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
4
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 At this time before I turn it over,
3 this is actually a Planning Board meeting.
4 You'll see my Planning Board to the left.
5 Chairman Gubitosa will introduce them. But
6 before that, I'd like to introduce the Stony
7 Point Town Board and some other Stony Point
8 elected officials in the room. We have
9 Councilman Basile. Next we have Councilman
10 Monaghan. Councilman Javenes. Councilman
11 White. Legislator Jobson. Also in the crowd
12 tonight from Stony Point we have Assemblyman
13 James Skoufis is here. And we have two other
14 Stony Point elected officials, Larry
15 Brissing, our Superintendent of Highways is
16 here and our Town Clerk, Joan Skinner is
17 here.
18 Again, I just ask that we have respect
19 for everyone talking here tonight. This
20 should be very interesting. We're learning
21 along with you. That's what this is about.
22 We're all out here tonight because we care
23 about our community as this Town Board does.
24 You can put your faith in us and we are going
25 to give you the best we can. We are not
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
5
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 going to shove anything down anyone's throat
3 here. We want what is best for this town as
4 you do. That's why we're all here.
5 And before we go any further, if I
6 could please ask you all to join me and stand
7 for the Pledge of Allegiance.
8
9 (Pledge of Allegiance)
10
11 SUPERVISOR FINN: At this time I'm
12 going to turn this meeting over to our
13 Chairman of the Planning Board, Mr. Tom
14 Gubitosa. I'm sorry, I missed one very
15 important person I forgot to introduce. We
16 have from the Rockland Business Association,
17 a member of the Governor's Economic Council
18 for the Hudson Valley, we have Al Samuels
19 here as well. A very important person from
20 Rockland County and the Hudson Valley. Al,
21 welcome.
22 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Thank you, Geoff.
23 As Geoff said, I'm Tom Gubitosa, Chairman of
24 the Planning Board. With me tonight Gerry
25 Rogers, Pete Muller, Mike Ferguson, Eric
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
6
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 Jaslow, part of the Planning Board.
3 Like Geoff said, this is a joint
4 informational meeting being held by the
5 Planning Board and the Town Board. Just to
6 let everyone know, this is the first of many
7 meetings about New Planet's proposal. The
8 purpose of this meeting is for New Planet to
9 provide information to the boards and the
10 public about itself, its proposed facility
11 and its proposed waste to renewable biofuel
12 process.
13 Numerous opportunities will be given to
14 the public for input in the future. This
15 will be a lengthy review process and the
16 public will have ample opportunity to comment
17 on the proposal as more information on the
18 environmental impact becomes available.
19 After the presentation, we will take a
20 break and collect index cards from members of
21 the public. They should be circulating right
22 now. And basically the public can write down
23 any questions it has about the presentation
24 and submit them to the Planning Board at the
25 break. Please include your name and contact
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
7
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 information on the index card in case we
3 don't get to the -- if we don't address your
4 question tonight, someone from New Planet
5 will get back to you. We also note for
6 tonight all the information or all questions
7 be limited to the presentation.
8 We all have questions and concerns
9 about the environmental issues like traffic,
10 air emissions, the wetlands, the noise,
11 visual and community character and each and
12 every one of those concerns will and must be
13 addressed during the SEQRA environmental
14 review process. For now we are trying to
15 understand the operational end and the
16 proposal so we can properly anticipate the
17 environmental issues that should be
18 addressed.
19 With that being said, I would like --
20 I'm going to turn over to our attorney, John
21 Furst, just to give everyone an update on
22 where we stand with the DEC. And like Geoff
23 had said before, this is not a town facility.
24 This is a school facility. So if you walked
25 in you saw signs on the door to the
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
8
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 cafeteria, like the cafeteria rules that I'd
3 like to follow: Be polite, be respectful.
4 Right now I'm going to introduce our
5 attorney, John Furst.
6 MR. FURST: Thank you, Chairman. I
7 just want to go over a couple of quick
8 procedural things before we start the
9 meeting.
10 I'm special counsel for the town.
11 First let me provide a little procedural
12 history here. Just to catch up some of the
13 folks that are here. Back in September 2014,
14 a petition was submitted to the Town Board
15 requesting a zoning text change. Back in
16 October an additional petition for a zoning
17 map change was then submitted to the Town
18 Board. Simultaneously with that petition
19 there was an application to the Planning
20 Board for the proposed facility. After all
21 that information was submitted, the Planning
22 Board declared its intent to be Lead Agency
23 in connection with the State Environmental
24 Quality Review Act. They circulated to over
25 40 different agencies and to notify everybody
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
9
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 of their intent. In early December the
3 Department of Environmental Conservation
4 expressed their intent to be Lead Agency. So
5 at the last Planning Board meeting after we
6 got the letter from the Department of
7 Environmental Conservation, the Planning
8 Board authorized myself and the Chairman to
9 reach out and coordinate with the DEC with
10 respect to the Lead Agency status. The
11 Planning Board had no objection to the DEC
12 being Lead Agency. However, the Planning
13 Board just wanted to make sure that they were
14 a very interested agency and coordinating
15 closely with the Department of Environmental
16 Conservation because obviously there's a lot
17 of local zoning and land use impacts in
18 connection with this project.
19 So this morning we did have a meeting
20 with the Department of Environmental
21 Conservation. We have been assured by the
22 DEC that the Planning Board will play a very
23 active role in this process. It was a very
24 positive meeting. We look forward to working
25 with the DEC on this project and reviewing
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
10
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 all the environmental impacts from this
3 proposal.
4 That's kind of one of the reasons why
5 given the DEC's impending Lead Agency
6 declaration, it makes sense to forego any
7 major discussion about the environmental
8 impacts until the DEC is actively involved.
9 Since they are going to be the Lead Agency on
10 this project, they should be here and they
11 should be around to hear all the comments on
12 it.
13 So we would like to focus the questions
14 on any of the presentation from New Planet
15 regarding the technique, the science, the
16 technicalities involved with the proposal.
17 Again, we are kind of hoping to educate
18 everyone here, including the board members as
19 well as members of the public about the
20 process, about New Planet, the applicant
21 itself and save all the environmental
22 procedural questions until the DEC gets fully
23 involved.
24 I'll turn it back over to the Chairman
25 quickly.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
11
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Thank you, John.
3 Like John said, tonight is just the first of
4 many meetings. This is just an educational
5 meeting. Not only for the public, but for
6 the Planning Board and the Town Board. We
7 still need to know a lot of the information.
8 So tonight is an education for everyone. So
9 when I turn it over to New Planet, they are
10 going to give a presentation. They're going
11 to go over the proposed facility, the
12 technology involved, so I would ask that you
13 give them your attention, to let them finish
14 their presentation and not interrupt because
15 it's going to be detailed exactly what's
16 going to happen at the plant.
17 So like we said in the beginning, index
18 cards will be circulated. You can write your
19 questions on that, name, number, contact. In
20 case we don't get to you, someone from New
21 Planet will. Everything is going to be
22 answered. Hopefully they'll get to your
23 questions. If not tonight, later on. Like
24 we said, it's educational. We are learning,
25 you're learning.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
12
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 So I'd like to turn it over to John
3 from New Planet. Thank you.
4 MR. SMITH: John is going to talk
5 later. I'm Gary Smith, CEO of New Planet
6 Energy.
7 Town Board, Planning Board, citizens of
8 the region, we thank you for attending
9 tonight. I'd like to say that it's my
10 pleasure to be here representing New Planet
11 Energy for this informational meeting. I
12 think you are going to learn a lot of what
13 we're really doing.
14 I'd like to introduce two of our board
15 members who will not speak tonight. Our
16 Chairman, Jay Johnson, and our Vice-President
17 and Secretary, George Bauer.
18 And I think just by our attendance
19 here, it shows by your attendance how
20 important we think this meeting is and this
21 project is to the community.
22 Again, I said I'm proud to be here and
23 associated with this technology and the
24 support staff who you will hear from tonight.
25 I've been asked to give my background as to
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
13
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 what I've done to entitle me to be called CEO
3 of New Planet Energy which I'm very proud of.
4 My background includes Cummins Engine Company
5 beginning in about 1980 with alternative
6 engines. CEO of Hercules Engine Company.
7 CEO of a public company called High Plains
8 Corporation in Wichita, Kansas where we had
9 ethanol plants in Kansas, Nebraska and New
10 Mexico. And I was involved with New Planet
11 Energy in our starting plant in Vero Beach
12 which you will hear about later.
13 During this time I was on the board of
14 the Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition. I was
15 Chairman of the Renewable Fuels Association
16 and I served on the Abengoa board which we
17 sold High Plains to for three years.
18 I only point this out to show my
19 experience of the various technologies in the
20 marketplace. My association with New Planet
21 Energy as I said goes back to our Vero Beach
22 plant and now with our plant in Stony Point.
23 I hope that we get that plant through.
24 I know you will all be pleased with the
25 technology you will hear tonight and how it
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
14
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 will fit safely into your community while
3 increasing the employment and tax base of the
4 region.
5 Now I'd like to introduce John
6 Cruikshank. John is our President and
7 co-founder of New Planet Energy. He's been
8 the boots on the ground and our face of Stony
9 Point. I think many of you who are here will
10 recognize him. John really has worked hard
11 to make this come to fruition. John, would
12 you come on up and speak.
13 MR. CRUIKSHANK: Good evening again.
14 John Cruikshank, President of New Planet
15 Energy. At New Planet Energy, we are
16 developers of clean energy projects, in
17 particular converting waste into clean
18 electricity and biofuels. Our proposed
19 project in Stony Point represents a nearly
20 $600 million investment in what we believe
21 will be of great value to the community.
22 In our experience we've tried to follow
23 a community-based siting and development
24 project which embraces a community and
25 political leadership and the residents in a
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
15
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 collaboration of putting this project
3 together.
4 Essentially if the project doesn't work
5 for you, it doesn't work for us. So we need
6 you to understand everything you can about
7 the project, our technology, who we are, what
8 we stand for and the experience what we have
9 done in the past in working with the
10 communities in bringing a project like this
11 to fruition.
12 Several of your state and local
13 political leadership have visited our project
14 in Vero Beach and communicated with the
15 county commissioners, with other political
16 leadership and with the residents down there
17 to qualify both New Planet and the approach
18 we've taken to siting and development.
19 Again, I want to stress that this is
20 the first in a series of public meetings,
21 hearings and workshops we hope to put on in
22 coming months where the public will be able
23 to participate and interact with us, getting
24 questions answered, understanding this
25 company, our technology, the parties that we
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
16
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 are working with in the community and getting
3 to a level of comfort that you would need
4 that I would want if I were in your shoes.
5 So please understand we are coming into the
6 community not with an approach this is what
7 we are going to do, we are coming in this is
8 what we would like to do. We are introducing
9 it to you. We want to educate you, engage
10 you in a discussion of what we are and what
11 we are not because there can be at times
12 misunderstanding and misinformation. We want
13 to clear that all up and that will take place
14 over the next coming months at these
15 meetings.
16 So we welcome you in the future. We've
17 set up a website that will provide further
18 information and ongoing updates.
19 And I guess with that I'm going to go
20 to the next level and introduce my associate,
21 Tom Yonge. Thank you all for joining us
22 tonight.
23 MR. YONGE: Thank you, John. Thank
24 you, Planning Board. And thank you, Town
25 Board.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
17
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 Before I get into my quick discussion,
3 one thing John forgot to mention was there
4 are information sheets and fliers in the
5 back, that has the website address, contact
6 information and a little bit about New Planet
7 and the project. So please feel free to take
8 as many of those as you like.
9 Okay, as John mentioned, my name is Tom
10 Yonge. I am an environmental consultant, an
11 engineer assisting New Planet with this
12 project. I really appreciate the opportunity
13 to speak with you here tonight.
14 The company I work for is a company
15 called Golder Associates. I'm a practice
16 leader for the air engineering and project
17 development group. Golder is a global
18 consulting company that has about 1,500
19 employees in the U.S. Two of our offices are
20 relatively local here. We have one in Newark
21 and one in Buffalo. We will be employing a
22 significant number of staff in those offices
23 to help us as we go through this project.
24 So a little bit about me and what I do
25 and what my role will be on this project. My
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
18
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 practice focus is really helping quantify and
3 qualify environmental impacts associated with
4 waste conversion projects. This being a
5 waste conversion project. So quickly, when
6 you hear that term, it's a project that
7 basically employs a conversion of discarded
8 item such as municipal solid waste or MSW
9 which is a term you'll hear a lot tonight,
10 wood waste, wastewater sludge, anything
11 people don't want to -- a beneficial reuse to
12 a product that has value. So that could be
13 renewable diesel like this project, it could
14 be bioethanol, it could be power, it could be
15 fertilizer. There's any number of processes
16 that we can do and we have the technology for
17 in the marketplace to convert these described
18 materials.
19 I have the good fortune of having
20 worked on one of these waste conversion
21 projects with not only New Planet Energy, but
22 also with TRI, who's our technology partner
23 on this project.
24 I was also on the project team for the
25 Vero Beach project that John mentioned and
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
19
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 it's one of the proudest projects that I've
3 worked on in my professional career. I
4 really enjoyed it. It went well. It's
5 really been something of a feather in my cap
6 so to speak.
7 So beyond that, what are we doing? One
8 thing we would like to do on this project is
9 helping companies implement sustainable
10 practices throughout the design, construction
11 and operation process. When we say
12 "sustainable practices," what does that mean?
13 Well, the first thing we'd like to do when we
14 are trying to incorporate sustainability is
15 doing thorough options analysis. There's
16 lots of sites. There's lots of technologies,
17 there's lots of sizes, all sorts of things in
18 the decision-making process that we would
19 like to help companies like New Planet go
20 through as they are developing this project.
21 So we are still pretty early in the process.
22 Other than having evaluated lots of sites,
23 John has been here a long time looking at a
24 lot of different places and settled on
25 through this process the Stony Point site as
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
20
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 being really kind of ideal for this project.
3 As we move through this process, we'll
4 continue to do stakeholder, community
5 outreach like this, stakeholder engagement.
6 And by "stakeholder," I mean anybody who has
7 a stake in the outcome of this project.
8 That's all of you. What we will do through
9 this process is really kind of work towards
10 balancing the environmental and social
11 impacts with economic goals of this project.
12 If we've done our job correctly, we will get
13 through this process where we kind of met all
14 those goals. We minimized the impacts
15 environmentally and socially, we actually
16 added benefit, we added value and in addition
17 we made this a project that works.
18 I'm happy to say in this case we have a
19 lot to work with. This is great technology.
20 We are very excited. And again, as we get
21 more into the process and more meetings and
22 to the next presentation I think hopefully
23 you will see some of the benefits that I've
24 come to see as well.
25 With all that being said, the
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
21
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 foundation for a successful project on our
3 end is open and transparent communication.
4 So you've already heard that a lot and you
5 will continue to hear it through the evening.
6 That's how it's going to be successful. It's
7 going to be something that the community is
8 proud of and that we would like to have.
9 So that's what you get from me. You
10 call me. I'll tell you what I know. There
11 is going to be a website. We will put the
12 permit application and all that kind of stuff
13 will be there for everybody to see and to
14 talk about as we go through all this.
15 Again, with that being said, one thing
16 we all need to keep in mind, we are still
17 pretty early in this process. Especially in
18 the design part. I think John's due
19 diligence phase and the work that he's done
20 in the options analysis and finding the site
21 is pretty well developed. Now we go to the
22 design phase. That could be a six-month,
23 nine-month process. Say if this were a
24 baseball game, right now when it comes to the
25 design and permitting, we are probably in the
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
22
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 top of the 2nd inning. So everybody still
3 has lots of chances to throw pitches and lots
4 of chances to get at bats.
5 As such, some of the impacts as we're
6 quantifying, we are optimizing. We are
7 trying to always get to that point. So just
8 bear with us. We appreciate your patience as
9 we go through this process.
10 Again, appreciate your patience and
11 interests as we optimize the design and
12 quantify the benefits. We really look
13 forward to working with this community and
14 answering your questions, receiving them on
15 the cards and moving forward. Again, I
16 assure you that I'll answer any questions
17 that will come my way.
18 With that being said, I'll hand over
19 the microphone to Mr. Chris Doherty who is
20 the Vice-President with TRI or ThermoChem
21 Recovery and he will talk to you about the
22 fun part which is the process.
23 MR. DOHERTY: I will try to remember
24 to speak into the mic the whole time.
25 Hopefully I'm being heard.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
23
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 My name is Chris Doherty. And I
3 actually was not nervous until I came here
4 and looked out this way. So I hope that my
5 excitement and passion for this project will
6 trump the butterflies. And I want to thank
7 John and Tom and the Town Board, the Planning
8 Board, Mr. Smith for inviting me here.
9 I do want to say that TRI, and I'll
10 explain what our company is and what our
11 company does, but we are truly excited to be
12 here and to be providing this technology to
13 the proposed project.
14 We are very passionate about our
15 technology. We are proud of it. It's a
16 clean and green technology that all of the
17 folks at the company are deeply passionate
18 about. And although it may sound corny, we
19 are passionate about it because we think it
20 can positively change the world. And
21 sometimes you have to apologize for corny
22 statements, but I tend to make them anyway
23 because we, this country is dealing with
24 climate change. This world is dealing with
25 climate change. Something has to change and
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
24
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 more than that, many, many things have to
3 change. Clean technologies that can convert
4 energy from waste sources is one of those
5 ways to address the global challenge of
6 getting clean, cheap energy without damaging
7 our one and only planet.
8 Also, this is not a prepared anecdote
9 because I don't do those, I don't have those,
10 but as I was getting ready and I saw the room
11 starting to fill up, I was actually reminded
12 of a painting by Norman Rockwell, probably my
13 favorite painter. I'm a Massachusetts guy,
14 so I plug Rockwell. It's the one where it's
15 in a school and it's a bunch of folks who
16 have come, there's the town leaders on one
17 end and everyone sitting in chairs like that.
18 You don't know what the issue is, you don't
19 know what the topic is, but it's kind of a
20 glance of the democratic process in the
21 making where you come, you say your piece,
22 you have to get approvals from this group and
23 that group and this group and the other
24 group. And that's what democracy is. That's
25 where people come and listen, hear and stand
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
25
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 up, and as my colleagues have said, this is
3 just one manifestation of that. But we are
4 as proud to be involved in that kind of
5 process which is entirely appropriate with
6 all the regulations and all the checks and
7 balances and all the things that should be in
8 place and are in place for a project like
9 this, so we look at this as a very important
10 part of the process and we are happy to be
11 here.
12 I feel like I've been set up. I'm the
13 only one that did slides. I hope it's okay,
14 but to get across some of these issues, I
15 wanted to have these. And of course, we can
16 send these out as well. We can make copies.
17 They will be on the website. I don't want
18 people to feel they have to pay too close
19 attention to the notes because these will be
20 provided to you.
21 So as I mentioned, TRI -- it's probably
22 worth mentioning, although TRI is a lot
23 easier to say. I should point out what the
24 TRI stands for. TRI is ThermoChem Recovery
25 International. We are a Maryland based
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
26
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 company, and again, even in our mission
3 statement it's a bit unapologetic and corny.
4 We were founded in 1996 on the basic idea
5 that thoughtful, advanced technologies can
6 improve the safety, efficiency and value of
7 converting waste streams into valuable
8 energy. So that's the raison d'etre of our
9 company. It'll specifically be able to
10 safely and reliably take and convert waste
11 streams which there are a wide variety of
12 waste streams, and we can talk about that,
13 into something valuable for the community.
14 So we are a technology company. We
15 have engineers and scientists and inventors
16 and we develop technologies and then optimize
17 them and commercialize them specifically to
18 do what I mentioned which is to take high
19 volume, tricky complex feedstocks that are
20 either otherwise not used at all for energy
21 or are converted in less efficient polluting
22 ways historically. We will talk about that.
23 One of our goals in a nutshell is to
24 tell you all or to start to tell you all what
25 the process is, but also what the process
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
27
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 isn't. We want to be both affirmative in
3 saying here is what we do and who we are.
4 But we've found that it's also worth defining
5 us at this level and at other levels as what
6 we are not. Taking those two things
7 combined, what we do and who we are and then
8 explicitly pointing out what we're not to try
9 to avoid any misunderstandings or
10 misperceptions, together we hope that will
11 give you an understanding at this level of
12 why we are a better way to convert these
13 feedstocks.
14 The recovery is underlined. I should
15 have said I'm here with a colleague of mine
16 from TRI, Shawn Freitas. He may be available
17 as well for questions or other things. He
18 underlined that word. Now I should say why
19 he underlined that. Because although the
20 name is kind of clunky, what we are trying to
21 do is recover the energy in a carbon and
22 hydrogen that's in those waste materials,
23 we're trying to recover that, and we use a
24 thermochemical process. If we had gone
25 through some kind of focus group, we never
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
28
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 would have come up with such a clunky
3 engineering kind of name, but that's our name
4 and that's what we do.
5 I said TRI. We are almost twenty years
6 old. We are neither a brand new entity that
7 has just been created in someone's garage,
8 nor are we one of the old kind of usual
9 suspects in the energy industry. We think
10 that's a good thing. It is what it is for
11 the first point. But we think it's a good --
12 it fits because we have been around for long
13 enough to really develop and implement and
14 practice and improve our technology. So it's
15 just not like a concept or something quite
16 nascent. At the same time we are new enough
17 and small enough to really embrace
18 innovative, newer, fundamentally better
19 approaches to older problems.
20 We started in 1996. Actually we were
21 not originally a company that focused on what
22 is the main feedstock of this proposed
23 project, municipal solid waste. We didn't
24 start there. Our company's genesis is
25 actually in the pulp and paper industry which
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
29
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 is a large global industry and it's what we
3 presented to the pulp and paper industry was
4 a way for the pulp and paper plants to
5 convert one of their waste streams which is
6 called black liquor, which some people may
7 know it, but it's a fairly esoteric
8 by-product of the pulp and paper process.
9 Think of a black, tarry, viscous goop that
10 has a lot of chemicals in it. Any pulp and
11 paper mill needs to reclaim the energy,
12 ThermoChem Recovery International, and then
13 give the chemicals back. So that's the birth
14 of our company was using our process for
15 that. But, in addition to doing this cleaner
16 and more efficient process for the very
17 idiosyncratic product of black liquor, we
18 also moved into waste streams writ large.
19 Perhaps the biggest and most well-known
20 of all waste streams is municipal solid
21 waste. It's the opposite of an esoteric
22 idiosyncratic feedstock. It's highly
23 abundant. It's very heterogenous and this
24 planet needs to come up with much better ways
25 of dealing with those materials than sending
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
30
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 them off to a landfill and just turning a
3 blind eye to them or converting them in old
4 and messy inappropriate processes.
5 So in 2003 we commercialized our
6 process on black liquor. In 2008 we
7 constructed what is jargony, but it's this
8 innovative process demonstration unit, think
9 of it as a refinery with all the unit
10 operations of a refinery like the one
11 proposed here for Stony Point. So it's a
12 full blown model of MSW material coming in
13 and clean transportation fuels coming out.
14 So we have been running that puppy since 2008
15 on a wide variety of feedstocks as we
16 continue to learn and as we support clients
17 and support projects. It's a very malleable
18 refinery in order to test and verify and have
19 quite literally waste streams and then
20 analyze the waste streams.
21 Just one quick digression. We have
22 been running that facility for several years
23 now. All of the ash that comes out of that
24 facility has been tested and it's a
25 nonhazardous ash. Most of the material as is
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
31
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 the whole raison d'etre is converted into
3 usable energy and fuels. Unavoidably some
4 amount of incoming material is going to be
5 irreducible and is going to be in an ash form
6 just like you would expect. All that ash
7 that comes out is itself a product because,
8 1, it's not hazardous which is important to
9 point out. Number 2, it can be used as a
10 aggregate in cement or jersey barriers or you
11 name it. The reason I make that tiny
12 digression is that facility lets us not even
13 test so much as run full bore on any type of
14 configuration that is of interest for
15 permitting or for analysis or evaluation or
16 what have you.
17 In 2011 we in supporting of projects
18 that had not MSW feedstock, but wood waste
19 and agricultural waste feedstocks, we ran
20 through all those traps, mimicked exactly
21 what a larger size facility would have and
22 then did all the testing. So the reason we
23 point these particular points out of the time
24 line is to just try get across what we think
25 are meaningful milestones in our company's
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
32
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 history. No, we didn't start in municipal
3 solid waste, but the market has actually
4 pulled us to that because of the size of the
5 societal problem and the need to do something
6 smarter, safer, better and cleaner with
7 mountains of municipal solid waste in one
8 form or another.
9 I think most of you would have a
10 similar unappealing image in your head of
11 what are the components of municipal solid
12 waste? As I mentioned, municipal solid waste
13 by its very nature is heterogeneous. It's
14 going to change by location. It's going to
15 change by season. It's going to change by
16 any number of parameters, right, so it is the
17 opposite of homogeneous predictable
18 feedstock.
19 Okay, you got to start somewhere. What
20 is municipal solid waste? For the most part
21 we can break it up into three categories. I
22 have good news and bad news. I found the
23 pointer. Now I'm off and running here. I'm
24 not sure it adds any value to you, but I feel
25 better having it.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
33
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 Tom mentioned discarded material. So
3 what are waste products? It's not an
4 artificial distinction. Number 1, it's
5 discarded, so it's waste because somebody has
6 decided it's waste. Someone made the
7 decision to throw something out, whether in
8 the household garbage or in business garbage,
9 or commercial and demolition garbage, it's
10 been discarded. It's going to change. For
11 the most part you are going to get -- you
12 know what just occurred to me. This is a pie
13 chart. That's kind of gross, John. This is,
14 in fact, a pie chart. In this part of the
15 pie chart is what we will call biomass.
16 Organic. It might be called biogenic
17 material. It's a whole host of stuff that is
18 discarded. Food waste alone in this country
19 is just a national shame of the amount of
20 food that gets thrown out. Of course hand in
21 glove with any effort like this is, of
22 course, trying to throw out way less food and
23 throw out way less of anything. The fact of
24 the matter is right now across the country
25 when you look at MSW, a significant portion
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
34
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 of that is going to be food scraps, which is
3 wet, putrescible food, yard waste, sludge,
4 just basically a big gunky muck. Not unlike
5 some of that black liquor that we mentioned.
6 It's wet. It can be easily 50 to 60 percent
7 water in there. That's a significant portion
8 of what comes in on any typical given garbage
9 truck. Down here you have a more orderly,
10 but also a significant amount of recyclable
11 materials; glass, cans, bottles, paper,
12 cardboard. Also I'm not an expert on this
13 area at all, but even in places that have
14 pretty active recycling programs which are
15 great and they should be encouraged, it's a
16 pretty open secret that an awful lot of very
17 recyclable material gets thrown into the
18 "garbage" garbage. So that's why we want to
19 try to include that. You try to get it out
20 as early as possible, but the fact of the
21 matter is a significant portion of trash, MSW
22 garbage, has entirely recyclable material in
23 it.
24 And the last bit, we just kind of
25 called it garbage, it's kind of what you
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
35
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 might expect. It's plastic. It's baggies.
3 It's chips. You name it. A lot of plastic.
4 There's a lot of low end plastic there.
5 So I mentioned that we were going to
6 try to get across in this compressed, who we
7 are and what we do, what we are not as well.
8 Many of you may have very understandably an
9 image in your head of what any process that's
10 going to take garbage in and send out fuels
11 or electricity, what they do. And it's very
12 understandable of that perception, but some
13 may have no perception, but I would expect
14 that most would have some perception and that
15 perception wouldn't necessarily be based on
16 the most similar plants that exist right now.
17 Here is one of the places where I waive and
18 say here is one big difference between those
19 and what we are proposing here in this
20 project. We are not an incineration project
21 or process. That's not putting lipstick on a
22 pig and making some kind of nuance
23 distinction and then trying to say this is
24 the nuance distinction. We are not
25 incineration. The first way we are not
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
36
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 incineration is we can't take -- the process
3 can't take glass and these plastics and cans.
4 We can't take them. We don't want them.
5 It's not what we're designed for. So big
6 difference number 1 is this process doesn't
7 take trash in the typical sense as a
8 feedstock. The municipal solid waste is a
9 precursor feedstock from which we have to
10 pull the parts that would otherwise go to the
11 landfill and decompose, that's what we want.
12 That's our feedstock. So we recycle whatever
13 has gotten through even from say a less
14 energetic recycling campaign to a really good
15 recycling campaign. Whatever amount of
16 recycling materials that comes in that's
17 still in the feedstock, job 1 is to take that
18 out and recycle it for the dual reason of you
19 can make money off of recyclables, and 2, you
20 don't want that stuff in your process because
21 you can't convert it. It's bad. The other
22 part where it's important, we have this
23 dramatic graphic to indicate at a glance that
24 we don't take trash like that.
25 Now, I know in Baltimore where our
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
37
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 company is based, right as you get into
3 downtown Baltimore there's a historical trash
4 to energy facility. It's run by a company
5 called Wheelabrator. Wheelabrator is a known
6 company that does trash to energy. And
7 that's been there a long time. It's doing
8 its business. But I sometimes feel like when
9 people drive by on I-95, they very frequently
10 see backed up dump trucks, seven, eight,
11 nine, ten backed up dump trucks. Those dump
12 trucks literally drive into the facility and
13 they dump whatever is in there into like an
14 open mouth volcano pit and it's like a
15 furnace. That's why, and I hope I'm not
16 overdoing it, but we are not that. We don't
17 want to be that. We are fundamentally not
18 that in a couple of key ways. Number 1,
19 that's a very inefficient process. If you
20 ever watch one of those, you will see what
21 comes out the back is, you know, microwave
22 ovens and garbage and sofas. All manner of
23 things that are getting dumped into a fire
24 pit. Some like apocalyptic scenario which
25 creates mountains of ash, mountains and
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
38
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 mountains of ash that is problematic. So 1,
3 you get huge amounts of ash, and 2, that ash
4 is problematic because it has been converted
5 into that ash. So that's why we are taking
6 pains to say we are not that. We can't do
7 that. We don't want to do that. Yes, MSW
8 trucks come in from which there is an
9 elaborate thoughtful process that takes the
10 stuff that would otherwise go to landfill, we
11 dry it down to about 10 percent, we cut it up
12 into little pieces so it looks like kind of a
13 fluff. So it's very different on all levels
14 from this Dante-esque scenario of
15 incineration facility and we send it off to
16 recycling. So that's big difference number
17 1. Hopefully what you will see and you will
18 come back to why as a young company we draw
19 from idealistic engineers and inventors from
20 all over the world who want to be part of not
21 the current problem, but the solution to all
22 these things. So we dramatically put a black
23 pie wedge over the recyclables because we
24 don't take those. We recycle them.
25 Here's big difference number 2. All
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
39
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 those processes that most of you may have
3 understandably come in thinking, okay, I've
4 heard that there may be a waste to fuels
5 facility in Stony Point, I know how those
6 work. What they do is bring it in, they burn
7 it, they create a bunch of emissions, a bunch
8 of smoke and they burn it in a boiler. Who
9 knows. It's just big and messy and sloppy.
10 Here's big difference number 2. That old way
11 of doing things which I don't think is
12 permitable anyway, is represented by this
13 flaming match. It's the fire pit that I
14 mentioned, the open mouth volcano into which
15 any manner of things is done. Our process
16 does not have that fire. It does not have
17 that combustion. It doesn't use air and
18 combust that material into another product.
19 And this is relatively nuance, but it's kind
20 of one of the game changers. Our process is
21 a gasification process. What that means is
22 we convert the incoming material that I
23 briefly described as the stuff that would
24 otherwise go to the landfill that has lots of
25 good carbon in it, but that's not being used.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
40
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 We chemically convert that into a gas, but we
3 do so in the absence of combustion and air
4 which is represented here.
5 So when this gas, we call it smoke,
6 when this gas is emitted, I'll get to this
7 and show it hopefully more clearly. There's
8 going to be an animation which hopefully will
9 show this a lot better than I may be doing.
10 When we create that gas, we capture it all.
11 So that smoke, that synthesis gas is our
12 product. So rather than being a by-product
13 that's being spewed into the atmosphere, just
14 hypothetically, something like that would
15 never be approved or even proposed, but
16 hypothetically rather than that scenario, we
17 are capturing all of that gas because that
18 now has the hydrogen and carbon that we need
19 to make the clean fuels. Again, we have
20 learned through experience that we want to
21 make this distinction because it does -- it's
22 a distinction from which many other positive
23 attributes flow. It's not kind of just one
24 for the sake of making one.
25 So we get back to -- here's a pretty
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
41
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 good real world of what the material looks
3 like. It's bags of garbage that need to go
4 through the up front process. I should say
5 the project works with front end entities who
6 are quite expert in taking in all manner of
7 municipal solid waste and making it exactly
8 to the rather specific specification that I
9 described. We take out certain things, you
10 leave in other things, you dry it down to a
11 certain level and you introduce it into the
12 gasifier. So the folks who have done that,
13 there are about 130 facilities in Europe that
14 take garbage of one form or another and
15 convert it into -- in their case they
16 overwhelmingly go to electricity and they
17 burn it or boil it through steam to run
18 turbines to make electricity. They are not
19 all making fuels, but it's a very well-known
20 and established process that's quite
21 reliable.
22 Through this process, we are taking the
23 carbon that would otherwise be wasted and the
24 material that would otherwise go to
25 overflowing landfills and decompose be put
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
42
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 under the ground and throw off methane. When
3 they go to the landfill not only do you have
4 to have landfill space, the decomposing
5 material there creates copious amounts of
6 methane. So rather than that happening, we
7 put in our process and we do create the basic
8 building blocks for the kind of energy
9 products we have. So that's what this is
10 meant to get across. And again, all of these
11 will be handed out.
12 Another word on one of the big
13 differences. We have our gasifier and it's
14 shown in this graphic here where this says
15 water, carbon, water. It's in here. It
16 converts the material into this highly
17 valuable smoke that we capture. All of it is
18 contained in a closed system. That as I say,
19 there's a picture at the end that will get
20 this across more clearly, so we capture all
21 that, not just for environmental reasons, but
22 for the very reason that that is our product.
23 That is the material that has all of the
24 energy in it. So after we trap it here so
25 you see what was started as carbon and water
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
43
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 in the form of steam has now been converted
3 into hydrogen, carbon monoxide in a very
4 energy rich gas. The next thing we do, stage
5 2 of essentially a two-stage process, is we
6 take that captured valuable smoke that has
7 not been emitted into the atmosphere and we
8 put it over a catalytic process. There are
9 different ways to do this catalytic process.
10 They have been around for 70, 80 and 90
11 years. Quite successful, quite proven. The
12 one we use, we load up our reactor with a
13 cobalt catalyst and our smoke over the cobalt
14 catalyst results in the renewable diesel that
15 is the focus of this particular project.
16 It's quite an elegant system. I didn't
17 invent it, but I feel like I can call it
18 that. It's an elegant system that by its
19 very nature is particularly good with these
20 high volume complex feedstocks to create a
21 clean end product.
22 Now, this is another slide that my
23 colleague Shawn made. If you like it, I
24 collaborated on it with him. If you think
25 it's cheesy or misplaced, it was all him.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
44
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 The other big difference, the third big
3 difference, there aren't ten, I'm going to
4 get the hook here, the other big difference
5 is this. Hopefully there is a little bit of
6 a reveal in this. When we said earlier that
7 we convert this material and we don't do it
8 with combustion, we don't do it with an open
9 fire pit with death and destruction, we don't
10 do it with air, a reasonable question is,
11 well, then how do you do it? How do you do
12 it? How do you convert the trapped carbon
13 and hydrogen? Well, the big reveal is we use
14 steam. That's our secret ingredient. Our
15 process is a steam reforming process. That's
16 a type of gasification and it's a type that
17 we developed originally for the pulp and
18 paper industry, but it happens to have a host
19 of positive knock on effects for MSW. In a
20 nutshell, what those are, as we have
21 indicated, this is about how hot it gets
22 inside our vessel. 1,200 to 1,500 degrees F.
23 That's not that hot as these things go. It's
24 actually a pretty gentle process. It's
25 because you are using steam. Think of it as
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
45
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 a superheated steam bath which can't get up
3 to the temperatures of an open pit fire.
4 That's fine. But what it can do is it
5 converts what we need converted into the form
6 that we need it with steam without the highly
7 polluting, highly problematic aspects of the
8 open apocalyptic fire pit that has been used
9 in the past. It also gets to a synthesis
10 gas, a smoke that has got enough oomph in it
11 to be converted to fuels. A lot of those
12 older facilities can't make fuel. They can't
13 make fuels because their process doesn't
14 create a robust enough syngas. There's not
15 enough calorific value. There's not enough
16 oomph in it to turn it into fuel. So what
17 they do is they either just stop at volume
18 reduction, the historical products. Their
19 raison d'etre is to take a hundred tons in
20 and only have 20 tons of ash going out. Or
21 they burn the gas in a boiler like a hundred
22 year old technology and make steam to produce
23 electricity in a very inefficient way. The
24 reason they don't go to fuels is they can't.
25 They just chemically can't. So with the
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
46
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 steam reforming process we have all these
3 positive advantages and they allow us in
4 addition to being cleaner and more efficient,
5 they allow us to have a synthesis gas that
6 creates smoke that we can convert into fuels.
7 So those are the three big differences
8 as we continue to thread who we are and what
9 we do and don't do. So we are not burning
10 trash like on any level, we are not burning
11 trash. We are gasifying the material and we
12 are capturing all the smoke. The way we are
13 doing it, the way we are doing this is in a
14 rather innovative steam reforming way. That
15 is what frankly gives us -- it's what's
16 allowed us to be fortunate enough working
17 with other clients to capture or to win a
18 rather large amount of support from the
19 Department of Energy, Federal Department of
20 Energy and the Department of Defense because
21 in the former case they want to support
22 American clean energy technologies and in the
23 second case the Department of Defense wants
24 to be able to make jet fuel and fuel for
25 tactical vehicles that is made from
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
47
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 domestically abundant feedstocks and not
3 foreign or even domestic petroleum. So all
4 of those knock on effects, all of those
5 attributes have nicely in the last several
6 years resulted in significant support from
7 those agencies as well as from private
8 entities, including New Planet Energy. So
9 that image of the gimmicky lighter that
10 sprouts water/steam is part of our secret
11 sauce.
12 This is giving away the ending. Just
13 turn away. There's too much there to see.
14 I'm going to start this animation again.
15 It's short. Hopefully what this will show is
16 some of what I've said in this animation
17 representation of how the feedstock goes into
18 our closed vessel is -- the moisture is
19 almost flashed off almost instantly and
20 carbon and hydrogen is reformed with steam
21 with the absence of air, absence of
22 combustion into the building blocks that we
23 described. But in the walk through -- this
24 is a picture of our vessel. This is a bit
25 misleading. It would have a pipe on it. It
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
48
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 wouldn't be open. So here we have is a steam
3 reforming vessel, also sometimes called a
4 gasifier, but that can be somewhat
5 misleading. We have a bed drain at the
6 bottom because no matter how hard you try
7 lots of metals and things will still get
8 through and you have to basically open the
9 plug at the bottom and periodically drain out
10 clinkers. So these tubes here are the heat
11 input for the fluidized bed. So when you
12 look at this, this is the vessel into which
13 the biomethane, the MSW will ultimately come.
14 The first thing you do, and this is actually
15 kind of maybe big difference number 4 or
16 modest difference 1A. We use a circulated
17 fluidized bed. Our technology uses this
18 fluidized bed so we fill up our vessel with
19 some kind of benign bed medium like aluminum
20 oxide, like sand really. Something that
21 helps heat transfer from where you want it to
22 come from and where you want it to go. The
23 first thing you do is you fill up your vessel
24 with your benign material. Then you put in
25 the superheated steam, magic conversion
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
49
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 method. You fire up your heat exchangers and
3 then you get your bed up to temperature.
4 Then you bring in your material which has
5 been dried to 10 percent give or take. If
6 it's 12 it's not a problem. If it's 8 it's
7 better. And then you put it into the
8 fluidized bed. Now in this kind of thermal
9 fly wheel soupy goopy 1,500 degree bed you
10 got all this mixing going on. You are
11 converting your biomass, your MSW, you are
12 converting it into the smoke that we said,
13 you're capturing it here. Any then any
14 solids that may have gotten in there, they
15 just fall to the bed again. This is one
16 animated way of essentially showing that the
17 way that the steam is the process by which
18 you can reliably and cleanly convert the
19 usable energy in the form of hydrogen and
20 carbon monoxide into the building blocks that
21 lead to the fuel as encapsulated by H2O plus
22 carbon plus heat source, results in hydrogen
23 and carbon monoxide which together is your
24 energy gas. So that's the process in a
25 nutshell.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
50
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 I have a few more. So what we have
3 tried to focus on in this once over lightly
4 is, of course, the proposed products for the
5 Stony Point project. This kind of jar of
6 moonshine looking like, that is what the
7 diesel fuel exactly looks like which is kind
8 of counter-intuitive really. It's a water
9 clear substance that is the mid-distillate
10 exactly as it comes out of the process. This
11 here as it's labeled is paraffin wax. It's
12 longer chain hydrocarbons that can either be
13 used as wax which can be a lubricant, a base
14 oil, or candle material or you can further
15 crack that and turn it into more of this
16 diesel. But just as a factual matter, the
17 garbage comes in and these are the two main
18 products that come out which can then be
19 turned into all jet fuel or all diesel.
20 That's a customization issue that can be
21 determined. All of these things as you might
22 expect, but here I am pointing it out, is
23 that with the Department of Energy support
24 and the Department of Defense support, all of
25 these things have been vetted to the enth
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
51
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 degree and verified by any number of third
3 party engineers and independent engineers
4 essentially confirming every aspect of what
5 has been presented, albeit quickly here
6 tonight.
7 This is the facility that we have
8 constructed and operated since 2008. I think
9 one reason to show this, not because there's
10 any particular -- it's kind of a convoluted
11 hard to look at and say I see where this is,
12 I see where that is. The reason we are
13 putting it in is because this is the place
14 where we have for thousands and thousands of
15 hours turned very real not kind of cherry
16 picked MSW material into the diesel and the
17 wax and the jet fuel. And it also conveys in
18 one image that it's all captured. The last
19 thing literally we want to do is to have any
20 of that converted material be pumped into the
21 atmosphere because that, as I say, that's our
22 product. So we take that and we convert it.
23 And it goes from right to left, so this is in
24 Hebrew. It goes from right to left. So the
25 biomass comes in here, the MSW, garbage comes
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
52
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 in here, it gets converted, it gets cleaned
3 up. That's worth a quick mention or so.
4 When we create that very valuable synthesis
5 gas it needs to be cleaned. It needs to be
6 cleaned in situ, in that facility right there
7 and it is because that gas needs to be
8 extremely pristine when you take it and you
9 put it over these commercial tubes which is
10 the second stage, the one that converts the
11 gas into the transportation fuels. These are
12 exactly the size they will be here in Stony
13 Point. It's exactly what these are like.
14 It's quite a -- it's very impressive what it
15 does, but it's kind of a modest looking
16 facility. It really is.
17 This is just to give you an idea, this
18 is from our Canada project. We put this up.
19 We were trying to look for pictures. When
20 you think of it, once you put the reformer
21 vessel into a building, you don't get as good
22 a sense of what it's like. So the best time
23 to take a photo is one of these reformer
24 vessels is when it's on it's way to being
25 placed into a building. That's why we took
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
53
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 these particular shots. You saw the
3 animation that had eight tubes. This has
4 four tubes, but it's being hoisted into its
5 housing at our facility up in Canada, up and
6 running since 2003 naturally adhering to and
7 surpassing all of the appropriately stringent
8 Canadian requirements as you would expect.
9 This is a 0F1 mill. This is back in our pulp
10 and paper days. This particular mill is a
11 0F1 mill.
12 I think I'm almost over. I hope I
13 haven't gone on too long. This is also kind
14 representing the change from a process like
15 we are beginning now and Tom mentioned we are
16 in the top of the 2nd give or take as we
17 design the particular specific process. This
18 is a manifestation of another one of our
19 projects which once upon a time was a highly
20 thought out cad drawing and then becomes a
21 facility that you go to and that actually is
22 under construction now that converts
23 municipal solid waste, post recycling,
24 feedstock into jet fuel. Those folks are
25 going all the way to jet fuel in the Nevada
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
54
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 desert.
3 Okay, last slide. So TRI, we are
4 implementing our clean technology for a
5 sustainable environment. That's what drives
6 us. That's what helps us get the best and
7 brightest in the company. We want to be a
8 part of the next hundred years and improve
9 the health of our planet. So we are quite
10 excited about our technologies and we are
11 really excited to be part of this project.
12 And I had this and it is literally --
13 I've never been so cold in my life as I have
14 been in the last couple days here. These
15 guys talk about the Vero Beach project. It's
16 kind of a sore spot. This is the Christmas
17 card, the holiday card that TRI sent out. We
18 don't take ourselves too seriously here. For
19 those who can't see it, it's hilarious. It's
20 a snowman without the coal eyeballs saying he
21 or she is trying to reduce his dependence of
22 fossil fuels. For those lawyers among you,
23 we did pay the royalty for our card. But I
24 couldn't get the cartoon stock off there. We
25 have a royalty agreement with the artist.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
55
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 So that's us. Very excited. Top of
3 the 2nd. And I think I've used up my time
4 and now I will turn it back.
5 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: What we are going
6 to do now, there's index cards available that
7 we will distribute. We will take a 10, 15
8 minute break. Write down your questions.
9 When we come back, we will read out the
10 questions for New Planet. Unfortunately we
11 have this building until 10:00 and we would
12 like to wrap up by 9:45 so the staff can get
13 the building ready for the kids in the
14 morning.
15 Everything you see tonight, the slides,
16 the recordings, once we get the minutes it
17 will be posted on our website. If you miss
18 something and you didn't get it, we are going
19 to get it on our website. As soon as we get
20 it we will get a link to New Planet. We are
21 going to get the presentation. We are going
22 to get questions. Everything will be posted.
23 So what we'll do right now -- and just a
24 reminder, the questions will be on the
25 presentation tonight and there is going to be
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
56
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 future meetings for other questions. We will
3 take a 10, 15 minute break. Around 8:30 I'll
4 call you back.
5
6 (SHORT RECESS TAKEN)
7
8 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Thank you.
9 Everyone, please have a seat. All right.
10 Everyone, thank you. Just, remember we have
11 to follow the cafeteria rules. Like I said
12 before the break, a lot of the questions that
13 we are going to ask that we received from the
14 public, we have to go based on the
15 presentation. There's a lot of SEQRA
16 questions that came through and safety and
17 environmental questions. Those questions we
18 are going to leave there to forward to New
19 Planet because the DEC is going to be
20 answering a lot of those. They are the ones
21 that are going to be doing the process. They
22 are the ones along with the town will be
23 looking at all those details. Those
24 questions with SEQRA, related to SEQRA,
25 related to safety, you know, if we don't get
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
57
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 to it tonight, it will be given to New Planet
3 and it will be answered because the DEC will
4 be looking at that.
5 Since we have Chris here tonight and a
6 lot of the New Planet guys, there's questions
7 that came through with the presentation, with
8 the technology and the process. That's what
9 we are going to basically focus on with the
10 questions.
11 John, if you want to come up. I have
12 some here. For New Planet, one the questions
13 came through is what other U.S. firms process
14 and utilized the specific gasification
15 technology?
16 MR. DOHERTY: In addition to the pulp
17 and paper implementations, we are working
18 with a company called Fulcrum Bioenergy which
19 is implementing this technology in Nevada.
20 There was a photo of the facility there.
21 They have, I guess, broadly a similar mandate
22 of taking otherwise unused undervalued waste
23 streams and converting them into renewable
24 fuels. We also have energy projects, and by
25 energy, I mean electricity. Oftentimes
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
58
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 energy as opposed to fuels. Electricity as
3 opposed to fuels. With entities in Central
4 America and South America where they have
5 as -- perhaps as pronounced in certain places
6 as pronounced a municipal solid waste issue
7 as we do here. There's a variety of folks,
8 one company is Replanter that we work with
9 and some of the same -- some of the same
10 engineering procurement and construction
11 firms. There was a brief mention of Abengoa
12 Bioenergy. If you folks are familiar, it's a
13 Spanish based company that I think is the
14 second largest producer of ethanol in the
15 world in addition to having other energy
16 projects and we have several projects with
17 Abengoa as well.
18 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: The follow-up on
19 that would be what percentage of MSW will be
20 from outside New York State?
21 THE DOHERTY: Zero.
22 MR. CRUIKSHANK: Zero.
23 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Another question
24 is where is there a plant in the U.S. that
25 produces diesel and how many tons of MSW does
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
59
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 it process a day?
3 MR. DOHERTY: Repeat that question?
4 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Where is there a
5 plant in the U.S. that produces diesel and
6 how many tons of MSW does it process a day?
7 MR. DOHERTY: The Nevada facility
8 takes in a thousand tons a day of MSW and the
9 facility in North Carolina, it's a smaller
10 unit, essentially eight wet tons, four dry
11 tons per day.
12 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Another question.
13 Besides the synthetic diesel, what other
14 by-products will be produced and/or stored on
15 the site?
16 MR. FREITAS: My name is Shawn
17 Freitas. I'm a senior process chemist for
18 TRI. Aside from the Fischer-Tropsh liquids,
19 the diesel product, that fuel product,
20 there's going to be a small amount of
21 emissions from the boilers that are used to
22 make the steam. That's not so dissimilar
23 from the furnaces and the boilers that are
24 used to heat this building. We use natural
25 gas and water to make steam to hear our
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
60
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 reactor like Chris just talked about. That
3 will make a little bit of carbon dioxide and
4 a little bit of steam just like the furnace
5 and the boiler in this building does.
6 There's also going to be a little bit of
7 wastewater generated from the gas clean up
8 system depending on the project demand.
9 Either that wastewater is recycled on site
10 and reused or if there is local municipal
11 capacity it can be accepted there. As Chris
12 mentioned, there's a function of steam
13 reforming. The gas tends to be much, much
14 cleaner and easier to clean. So the things
15 that we're removing from it are far, far less
16 toxic than what you typically would be
17 exposed to with incinerator or combustion
18 facilities.
19 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: The next one is
20 probably a two part. Where does the heat
21 come from for the process and what fuel is
22 used to get the gasification process going?
23 MR. FREITAS: All right. So the heat
24 comes from two places. You superheat steam
25 because you have to get it up to 1,200 to
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
61
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 1,500 degrees F before it becomes a reactive
3 steam that can be used to thermally
4 disassemble the trash. So part of that heat
5 comes from superheating the water so like a
6 steam generator. That's not hot enough.
7 Your steam that comes out of your boiler is
8 not hot enough. So in that animation that
9 Chris showed, you saw something that was
10 described as a heat exchanger sticking in and
11 out of the reactor. Those heat exchangers
12 are something incredibly -- I could talk
13 about this for hours. This is my chance, so
14 I'm going to take it. There's something
15 called a pulse combuster. There are two
16 parts of that reactor that you saw that are
17 world firsts for us that make out thermal
18 conversion better than I think just about
19 anybody else's out there. The first are
20 those tubes you saw through the reactor,
21 those heat exchangers. They are called pulse
22 combusters. And they have the benefit of
23 being some of the most efficient combustion
24 driven heat exchangers on earth. They do
25 something very, very unique with their
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
62
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 combustion that allows them to push heat into
3 the reactor with an efficiency that's
4 unmatched by any other process out there.
5 The other part about it that Chris didn't get
6 into too much, those fluidized beds that we
7 use are some of the deepest in the world. We
8 not only pioneered pulse combuster heat
9 exchanger technology and proven it at a
10 commercial scale and succeeded hugely, but we
11 have also pioneered these deep, deep
12 fluidized beds. They are thirty plus feet
13 deep. That is phenomenally deep. It results
14 in a situation that allows you to use a lot
15 less energy to heat the reactor than you
16 would traditionally use for something that
17 like in your normal fluidized bed combusters
18 that have like two or three feet of fluidized
19 bed. So we have thirty feet. It allows us
20 to not only use the sufficient heat
21 exchanger, but also use less energy than we
22 would have otherwise to do a really good
23 thermal conversion, good mixing, really clean
24 gasification.
25 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: John.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
63
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 MR. CRUIKSHANK: It says you show the
3 pulp and paper plant in the presentation. Do
4 you have a full size working plant handling
5 MSW? Is the Florida plant the same as the
6 proposed one? The Florida plant is doing 500
7 tons a day of green waste. We are looking at
8 4,000 tons a day of municipal solid waste
9 here. Canada is 500 tons a day.
10 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Next question was
11 what happens to the small amounts of
12 discharge to be thrown away?
13 MR. DOHERTY: The question is what
14 happens to the small amount of discharge that
15 gets thrown away. When I hear that question,
16 I think of the ash that's left over. So
17 there's going to be certain amount of ash
18 when any feedstock that comes in that is
19 irreducible, nonconvertible material that can
20 and does vary by what you put in. So our ash
21 that we generate which we definitely, you
22 know, there's ash left over, is as you say 5
23 percent. Again, it's not a dodge. It
24 depends. If you bring in a certain amount of
25 feedstock, that can have a different effect
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
64
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 on your ash. Two points, our ash is
3 relatively small percentage, single digit
4 percentages. And it's nonhazardous which is
5 an important aspect. Depending on your
6 process, you can actually create a hazardous
7 ash that has to be disposed of in an
8 appropriate manner. If you have nonhazardous
9 ash, say some single digit percentage, that
10 can be used in concrete, that can be used in
11 aggregate, it can be land applied. There is
12 some carbon left in there that hasn't been
13 converted, so that's what happens to the ash.
14 Now, I kind of took a swipe at the
15 incineration because the reason why
16 incineration historically has much, much
17 higher levels of ash is twofold. One, they
18 take in a very different and broader range of
19 materials, but then they pulverize or they
20 essentially convert at very, very high
21 temperatures which results in heaps and heaps
22 of ash that can be hazardous.
23 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Thank you. The
24 separation of the MSW, the recyclables,
25 etcetera, is this done at the same facility
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
65
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 in Stony Point?
3 MR. CRUIKSHANK: Yes, it is.
4 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: We might have
5 answered this. Where does the power for the
6 steam come from?
7 MR. FREITAS: That's literally just a
8 steam boiler. That's the kind of equipment
9 that is used to heat your hospitals and
10 schools. It's often heated with electricity.
11 It can be heated with natural gas. You just
12 buy regular commodity power and fire a steam
13 boiler.
14 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Next question was
15 can you share a ballpark project cost? I
16 think we did that in the beginning.
17 MR. CRUIKSHANK: Ballpark project cost
18 is nearly $600 million.
19 MR. DOHERTY: Someone was waving and I
20 couldn't interpret the hand gesture. I'm
21 glad that they waved. Shawn's answer about
22 burning natural gas to provide heat that is
23 used in the process is certainly an accurate
24 one. It's also entirely possible and we have
25 done it, that we can skive off some of our
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
66
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 own internally generated syngas/smoke and use
3 that as a fuel to create the heat. So that's
4 as I say, it's more a question of what exact
5 configuration you want to go with? Just as a
6 practical matter, you can either go with
7 natural gas, you know, burning natural gas or
8 you can -- once you start up, you have to
9 start with something. So you need a pilot
10 light at first. Once you get up and going
11 you can then take your just created
12 smoke/syngas and use that as a fuel too. It
13 can be either or.
14 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Another question
15 is how many times have you pitched this
16 project and what were the objections to those
17 who declined to home this plant or house this
18 plant?
19 MR. CRUIKSHANK: I'm not sure what you
20 mean by how many times we pitched it other
21 than we have been in New York exploring this
22 as a possibility for more than a year and a
23 half. So I guess we pitched it a number of
24 times. We've really come in and explored the
25 environment to see if this is something that
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
67
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 might be accepted by the community. And what
3 was the other?
4 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: And what were the
5 objections to those who declined to house the
6 plant?
7 MR. CRUIKSHANK: With respect to
8 anybody declining to house us, out of
9 probably thirty potential sites, there was
10 one. It was in the area -- I'm not sure if
11 it's a city or town called Corinth up north
12 and they had a bad experience with a previous
13 facility that they just didn't want this in
14 the neighborhood any longer. Other than
15 that, we have not had any neighborhoods say
16 we're not interested. We just for a number
17 of variables this particular site proved to
18 be ideal for us and we hope to work that
19 through with you and move ahead.
20 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Another question,
21 two part. How do you load the sand in the
22 process and dispose of it?
23 MR. DOHERTY: How does the bed
24 material get into the vessel in the first
25 place and how does it get replaced?
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
68
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Yeah. How do you
3 dispose of it?
4 MR. DOHERTY: Actually in some
5 respects the animation is kind of
6 representational. In this one it's dumped
7 in. It's dumped in the bed from the top.
8 The aluminum oxide is like a sand and a small
9 amount per year will escape or attrit. It's
10 pretty small. It's a single digit percentage
11 of that bed material will attrit and that
12 just gets replaced by adding back X percent,
13 again, single digits per year into the bed.
14 I say it's like sand. It really is. When it
15 does come out, if it gets caught up in the
16 ash, it's like little particles of sand.
17 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: The second part is
18 how do you cool the system? I don't know if
19 we talked about that.
20 MR. FREITAS: As a highly integrated
21 small biorefinery, I know that what we just
22 described to you sounds big, but compared to
23 a monster petro-chem refinery, we are tiny.
24 In order to make that work we have to be
25 incredibly, incredibly efficient and produce
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
69
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 as little waste as possible. Heat is one of
3 those things. So we recover heat from our
4 exhaust and any place we can in the process
5 that's hot enough in something called heat
6 recovery steam generators. So those are all
7 over the place. The only other part of the
8 process that's cooled other than places that
9 we are recovering waste heat are the
10 Fischer-Tropsh reactors and they are cooled
11 with steam. So steam is put into the
12 reactor, that steam becomes even hotter as
13 bonds are formed and molecules are made.
14 That hot steam then goes through a HRSG and
15 another heat exchanger and it's sometimes
16 recycled, sometimes fresh makeup is put in.
17 In general, there's not all that much
18 cooling. We are working hard to make it hot
19 to drive the conversion. There's a little
20 bit of -- there's certainly some cooling that
21 happens in the gas clean up. But again, the
22 vast majority of the heat removed in the
23 process comes from those HRSG's and the FT
24 reactor. Actually I'm going to segue into
25 something. It wasn't totally mentioned in
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
70
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 Chris' decs, but I wanted to say to all of
3 you, our fuel making process is a lot like
4 making plastic. It's not -- this isn't a new
5 fangled Star Wars fuel process. What we're
6 doing is we're polymerizing carbon monoxide
7 together to make fuel molecules. So it's not
8 special effects. The world has been doing
9 Fischer-Tropsh for, I think, a couple hundred
10 years now. It's been awhile. The world is
11 really, really good at it. It really is just
12 a polymerization reaction, so it's not
13 special or untested. It's just a different
14 way of using polymerization to make fuels
15 instead of plastics using gas.
16 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Another question.
17 What is the feedstock capacity of the
18 proposed plant in tons per day?
19 MR. CRUIKSHANK: The feedstock
20 capacity tons per day is 4,000 tons per day.
21 Our assumptions are based on let's assume
22 4,000 tons coming in. We are assuming that
23 50 percent of that gross weight is going to
24 be consisting of recyclables, moisture and
25 things like rocks and dirt and things like
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
71
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 that. We really are seeking to process 2,000
3 tons a day and generate 38 million gallons a
4 year of renewable diesel.
5 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: What is the
6 production rate of diesel in barrels per day
7 or gallons per year?
8 MR. DOHERTY: I can do this. It works
9 out to be 2,260 barrels a day.
10 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: 2,260?
11 MR. DOHERTY: 2,260 barrels a day,
12 give or take.
13 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: I guess this goes
14 back to feedstock. Does it include
15 biosolids? I guess they have sewage sludge.
16 MR. CRUIKSHANK: Yes, it can include
17 biosolids like sewage sludge. We would want
18 to dry those out. The material itself can be
19 dried and processed.
20 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Another question
21 is what is the -- we might have answered
22 this. What is the basic difference between
23 the Vero Beach and Stony Point technology?
24 MR. CRUIKSHANK: They are two
25 distinctly different technologies. While
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
72
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 both are gasification, the TRI technology is
3 a more efficient and much more attractive
4 technology. The Vero Beach process is
5 agricultural waste into ethanol. This
6 process is municipal solid waste into
7 electricity and renewable diesel.
8 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: If the steam
9 reformers (indiscernible) clean ash, why
10 would there be a need to contract to
11 transport hazardous materials to a special
12 site in Lewistown, New York?
13 MR. CRUIKSHANK: I'm not sure I
14 understand the question because we have no
15 intention of -- no discussion thus far into
16 shipping hazardous waste anywhere. The ash
17 that comes out is to be considered a clean
18 ash and is going to be utilized by concrete
19 and cement companies as a blend and
20 strengthener for that material.
21 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Next question is
22 the process used in the conversion of a pile
23 MSW into the gardens and parks you want is
24 not clear. Where does the separation occur?
25 On site? I think we answered the other.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
73
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 Where does the unwanted material of the MSW
3 go?
4 MR. CRUIKSHANK: At this time
5 everything will be done on site. The MSW
6 will come in, it will be source separated.
7 Once the recyclables are separated, they will
8 be sent to recyclers. If I understood
9 correctly, the residual products, the
10 organics and such will be utilized, will be
11 dried and then utilized in the process.
12 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: The other question
13 was I think a few people in the beginning
14 might have missed the introduction. If you
15 could just introduce everyone who did the
16 presentations where a lot of people missed
17 that in the beginning. If you can just go
18 through that.
19 MR. CRUIKSHANK: My name is John
20 Cruikshank with New Planet Energy. We have
21 Chris Dorothy with TRI. New Planet Energy
22 CEO is Gary Smith. Thomas Yonge has been
23 with us, he's with Golder Associates, Tom
24 Yonge.
25 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Thank you, John.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
74
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 Another question was where does the water
3 come from for the process for the steam
4 conversion?
5 MR. CRUIKSHANK: If I understand the
6 question correctly, a great deal of -- a
7 large volume of the water we are looking for,
8 we are in the process of -- we've been
9 discussing it with the town and we can
10 utilize post-treatment water for that
11 otherwise known as gray or nonpotable water.
12 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: I guess one other
13 question -- another question, what does the
14 word cleaned mean?
15 MR. DOHERTY: What does the word
16 cleaned mean?
17 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: In the process.
18 MR. DOHERTY: In the process, sure. I
19 think it probably means different things at
20 different times. I do think the first thing
21 I thought of and want to point out is when we
22 create the syngas from the municipal solid
23 waste, the syngas, the smoke needs to be
24 cleaned. It needs to be cleaned to a very,
25 very high degree because that gas is then
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
75
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 going to be put over the Fischer-Tropsh
3 catalyst which is a remarkable substance, but
4 which is very intolerant of any contaminants.
5 So the syngas when it's first created has a
6 lot of cats and dogs in there as far as
7 different contaminants. If those
8 contaminants were to get through to the
9 catalyst, it would directly and negatively
10 affect the catalyst's ability to make a
11 transportation fuel. So the best image we
12 showed you was of the plant in North Carolina
13 where the middle of the facility, the bulk of
14 that was gas clean up, so when we say the
15 syngas is cleaned, we are saying the syngas
16 created from the incoming material, although
17 primarily composed of carbon and hydrogen,
18 carbon monoxide and hydrogen, it also has
19 trace elements of other materials,
20 contaminants which we cannot let through so
21 we have a system of scrubbers and guards and
22 other methods to trap to the parts per
23 billion that syngas. So other times when we
24 talk about a clean technology, kind a more
25 colloquially, I think of that as clean
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
76
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 meaning kind of at a minimum best available
3 technology and one that reduces greenhouse
4 gas emissions. On the greenhouse gas
5 emissions issue, it's probably worth pointing
6 out that in some of the other projects that
7 we have been involved in, the price of
8 admission for those projects to get the
9 government support is to have a significant
10 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, so you
11 have to show through the life cycle analysis
12 that Tom Yonge described that your process is
13 clean, which admittedly can be kind of a
14 fuzzy term, but you have to show that it
15 results in a significant reduction in the
16 amount of greenhouse gas going into the
17 atmosphere. Those types of models shown, and
18 by significant we're talking 75 to 80 percent
19 reductions in the standard greenhouse gas
20 emissions. So that's a twofold answer. An
21 attempted twofold answer. Number 1, we clean
22 that synthesis gas to a remarkable degree not
23 just because we think it's the right thing,
24 but also because as a practical matter the
25 catalyst can't tolerate any levels of
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
77
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 contaminants. And 2, in order to be in this
3 sector, you have to show with data
4 significant reductions in greenhouse gases to
5 get in. John reminded me that some of us may
6 have used the term clean ash. That is an
7 attempt to get across this idea that not all
8 ash is created equal and if someone says
9 there's a lot of ash, it doesn't ever sound
10 good, but there's ash that's loaded with
11 horrible materials and it's hazardous and
12 it's awful and it's a function of the process
13 that created it. It can be awful. And
14 there's ash that is really kind of a benign
15 resulting amount that no matter what your
16 process is can't be converted and if it's not
17 hazardous which you determine through
18 testing, it can be used as a material. You
19 get up to certain levels, yes, you can land
20 apply it, from a volume reduction point of
21 view you are already significantly reducing
22 volume of MSW in and ash out, forgetting
23 about the fuels and the electricity. At the
24 same time you still want to use every little
25 bit that you can. That's why as a function
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
78
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 of this ash being clean ash and being non-
3 hazardous you can do a lot of different stuff
4 with it.
5 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Thank you, Chris.
6 Just like I said before, a lot of cards that
7 I read tonight were on the process. A lot of
8 the cards that had SEQRA questions, safety
9 questions, that's questions that the DEC is
10 going to go through. They didn't really want
11 us to answer a lot of those questions because
12 they are still gathering the information.
13 Those questions we are forwarding over to New
14 Planet. They will be answered. I didn't
15 get -- just to give an update from the Town
16 Board or the Planning Board, I didn't get the
17 index cards if you wanted to ask something or
18 just wait. I'll throw that opportunity out
19 there.
20 SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Is this a
21 twenty-four hour operation?
22 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Hold on. What we
23 are going to do, the process, I think --
24 (interrupted)
25 MR. DOHERTY: The conversion process
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
79
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 is definitely a twenty-four hour a day
3 process. As far as what you might call the
4 front end conversion of the incoming MSW into
5 the usable feedstock, that can either be
6 done -- that's typically done in shorter
7 shifts. It's important that the process
8 stays a twenty-four hour process, but that's
9 not to say that every aspect of the plant is
10 a twenty-four hour process. Again, there are
11 different ways to approach it as you would
12 expect, but I think the closest thing to a
13 typical one is to have -- is to always have
14 the process going twenty-four hours because
15 it's a real -- there's significant advantages
16 of staying up and warm once you're up and
17 warm. But there can be shifts. Like normal
18 shifts for other aspects of the work which
19 can be, you know, done over five days and not
20 seven.
21 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Like I said in the
22 beginning, tonight was an informational
23 meeting to educate you guys, the Town Board
24 and Planning Board. Unlike a public hearing
25 where we have questions from the audience, we
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
80
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 took them in forms of index cards. As the
3 process goes forward and there are more
4 meetings and public hearings, this is when
5 you will have the opportunity to ask
6 questions, stand up and ask questions. As
7 far as tonight, this is an informational
8 meeting.
9 So what we will do is to wrap up
10 tonight, everything that is discussed tonight
11 will be on the website. A link to their
12 presentation. A link to the website. Links
13 to any other information that we will get we
14 are going to put on the website. We are
15 right now working with our web administrator
16 to update our website. A lot of this stuff
17 will be found on our planning page. We are
18 updating things. We will put in links. The
19 one thing I want to ask everyone, if you have
20 a question, you can call, you can ask the
21 town, you can ask one of the officials.
22 That's what we are here for. We don't want
23 the hearsay I heard from this person, from
24 this person. Just ask us. That's what we
25 are here for. We are working with the DEC.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
81
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 They will have a meeting.
3 What I'll do now before I close, Geoff
4 is going to just give a little wrap. After
5 Geoff is done I'll give some more information
6 before we close.
7 SUPERVISOR FINN: I just wanted to
8 make a few comments and more importantly
9 thank everyone. We have to thank, of course,
10 our school board for allowing us use of this
11 room. I know Ileana Eckert is here in the
12 back. Ileana, are you still here? Ileana
13 has been a great help getting this room. We
14 have to thank the staff here at the Farley
15 School. They did a great job setting up
16 chairs and everything else. We were in here
17 this afternoon helping them and they did a
18 wonderful job again. Of course our
19 presenters here tonight. They did a
20 wonderful job here tonight. But most
21 importantly we have to thank you. We have to
22 thank you for coming out, for caring about
23 your community. Coming out and listening and
24 being respectful here tonight. This was
25 wonderful. We really, really appreciate it.
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
82
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 We thank the Town Board of course and of
3 course our Planning Board as well.
4 As Tom just said, there's going to be
5 many more opportunities for the public to be
6 involved in this. This is something that is
7 going to be out here. This is not something
8 that we're going to make decisions. It's
9 something that you are going to make
10 decisions with us. You are going to work
11 alongside of us. We are learning along with
12 you. As I said earlier in this process, we
13 are not scientists or anything else up here
14 as board members. We are learning as we go
15 along. I can assure you many of us are here
16 tonight, we want to hear what's going on, but
17 we are scared. We are being taxed out of our
18 homes. It's the God's honest truth. We are
19 being taxed out of our homes and we want to
20 make sure that we are keeping an open mind
21 and listening to a possibility of a plant
22 coming here. There's great tax benefits to
23 this. I'm not going to throw out numbers
24 here, but that's what this is about. This is
25 about tax ratables. We understand that. Let
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
83
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 me assure you this. Mark my word, we will
3 not bring something in here that we think is
4 going to hurt, jeopardize the safety and
5 health of our residents. That's not what we
6 do. We are elected to stand up for the
7 people of our community. That's what we're
8 going to do. That's what the Planning Board
9 is going to do. We know that the DEC is
10 going to do the same exact thing. We are
11 very confident that the presenters here have
12 given us an early presentation of what this
13 is about. As the process goes along we are
14 all going to learn exactly how this works and
15 hopefully in the end we will all benefit with
16 jobs and a great tax ratable.
17 So I really want to thank you for
18 coming out tonight. We really, really
19 appreciate it and I'm going to turn it back
20 over to Tom.
21 CHAIRMAN GUBITOSA: Just to say it
22 again, our Planning Board meeting is the
23 fourth Thursday of the month. Our Planning
24 Board meeting and minutes are on the website.
25 So if New Planet is going to be on our
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
84
1 PROCEEDINGS
2 agenda, it will be publicized on our website.
3 Everything is there. We are going to have
4 links. Right now we have links to
5 presentations that New Planet had done. We
6 have a SEQRA document up there. If you are
7 not familiar with the process, we have
8 documents on the website that show you
9 exactly what goes on in the process.
10 Like Geoff said, I want to thank you
11 all for coming out, being respectful for the
12 presentation, letting them continue. Thank
13 you to the school and to the staff. I know
14 they want to get us out of here so they can
15 clean up for tomorrow. Thank you.
16
17
18 oOo
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
www.courtreportingny.com
[email protected] - (845) 634-4200 Rockland & Orange Reporting
85
1
2
3
4
5
6 THE FOREGOING IS CERTIFIED to be a true
7 and correct transcription of the original
8 stenographic minutes to the best of my
9 ability.
10
11
12
13
14 X______________________________
15 PATRICK M. DEGIORGIO
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25