Power Generation

City Circle is continuing to work towards new waste and resource recovery initiatives and pursue new methodologies to enhance services and products to contribute to a cleaner industry. The latest initiative has attracted the attention and support of Sustainability Victoria. At the Brooklyn recycling facility, CCG have implemented a gasification plant to generate power from waste demolition material.

CCG’s commissioning of its gasification plant to convert timber waste – mainly generated by demolition activities – into energy, offers remarkable alternatives to landfill. The facility is capable of providing one megawatt of electricity to power the company’s concrete recycling operation in Brooklyn, saving 300,000 litres of diesel fuel and diverting 15,000 tonnes of waste timber from landfill annually.

The Brooklyn plant prototype will provide a sustainable solution for other waste timber generators, as well as demonstrate the practical and economic advantages of gasification. These advantages are especially useful for Regional population centres where the current practice of transporting waste timber over long distances to landfill is unavoidable

Gasification technology has been available in Australia for a century without its full potential being fully realised. Gasification converts wood waste into energy rich gas by limiting the conversion process so combustion remains intentionally incomplete – the gas is then used to power a converted diesel generator.

The downdraft design implemented by CCG incorporates numerous environmental refinements and technical improvements on earlier systems including innovative fuelling and tar recycling, and higher gasification temperatures to produce cleaner gas with no harmful emissions.

The entire gasification and power generation facility is containerised and portable with a 1MWe plant housed in three shipping containers. The portability of the modular plant makes it ideal for regional areas where there is a great potential to divert timber waste from landfill to create a new supply of green energy independent of the national grid.