Direct Carbon Fuel Cells: Converting Waste to Electricity

Abstract

The U.S. Army has policies to minimize production of waste materials, maximize recycle of waste materials, and minimize energy consumption on its installations. A beneficial way to implement these policies is to convert paper, wood, vegetation, and Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) fractions into a carbon-rich feed stock by pyrolysis to fuel Direct Carbon Fuel Cells (DCFCs). DCFCs potentially offer a unique approach for the direct conversion of biomass-derived, carbon-rich solid fuel to electricity at very high conversion, with the production of a CO2-rich flue gas. This work gathered information on the quantities of waste material available at U.S. Army installations from installation reports and from the U.S. Army Solid Waste Annual Reporting System (SWARS) database, then estimated the amount of electricity that DCFC technologies could generate from those wastes, and finally compared those amounts with the current average annual electrical loads at the 10 largest Army installations.