How diligent does an administration decide to invest into infrastructure or commission use of causing onward cost-overrun burdens needing to be socialized across its society, when new combinations of proven Technologies from other sectors already promise to achieve higher standards? Aren’t governors and civil servants bound to a best effort principle, not just obliging to base their decisions on their best knowledge but on what they should know, given their responsibility for a specific sector?

In the field of Waste Management the Carbotopia™ approach has been made public since ISWA World Congress 2013 in Vienna! Though admittedly the branding only came in 3 years later grace to the WWF’s kind mentoring and support. But during all that time we had published about 20 papers in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and South America. Big Malaysian listed companies with high state owned fund share-holders took parts of the idea and outsourced a re-invention of the wheel to Universities. Tragically after all I could learn about their industries I don’t even consider the Carbotopia™ approach as BAT for their overall Carbon Efficiency and sustainability challenges.

Of course we saw biomass, municipal and petrochemical waste “gasification” projects fail meeting their goals in Germany, the UK, Italy, Brazil and Malaysia. On the other hand companies like Enerkem in Canada or Valmet in Gothenborg based on Repotech Technology from Austria meanwhile proved that accelerated thermochemical decomposition of carbohydrates and hydrocarbons is a mature technology. However in terms of Carbon Efficiency and cost-effectiveness so far demonstrated usage paths have not been geared towards storing chemically recovered Carbon for longer timespans than the fuel-storage until its combustion.

Carbon Efficiency is actually a result of reintroducing recovered Carbon into cycles of matter able to store it longer and/or over multiple product life cycles. Such as e.g. being the case in refining neat standard plastics from such non-fossil Carbon source. Or equivalently in the case of a Power-to-Gas energy storage based Hydrogen Fuel Cell Utility or transportation-fuel architecture employing consecutive physical Carbon Capture for Use [ #CCU ] cycles as an energy storage for repeated Substitute Natural Gas synthesis. Given the commercial value of CCU substituting fossil restocking at 3 times its fossil costs in the exemplary applications physical CCU delivers cost effectiveness coherently to Carbon Efficiency.

Isn’t there a potential infrastructure assets’ impairment risk through such higher standards becoming prevailing at some point in foreseeable future? So why negligently decide to not push innovation but regulate charges to the poor for investors’ satisfaction in e.g. incineration projects today? Teaming up across several regional authorities and industries to undergo a ≥ 10-fold First time Implementation of an Infrastructure Innovation may be safer – men landed on the moon and already sent its robots to Mars!

#CarbonEfficiency, #incoherence