Startech Environmental: Waste Gasification

I've had been poking around the edges of waste gasification technologies for a bit for a couple of reasons:

1. I'm trying to understand how it works.
2. Fuel from garbage? Cool.

Startech (STHK.ob) is a good example of this kind of technology (so is SkyGas). Essentially, they are using a plasma arc at temperatures of over 30K degrees Fahrenheit to 'molecularly disassociate' (aka completely incinerate) any kind of solid waste to produce 2 byproducts: gas that can be used as a fuel and a super hard stone. At these temperatures, you can pour just anything with carbon in it into a reaction chamber to produce the gas; sludge, garbage, even highly toxic materials get completely molecularly disassociated (yes, I just like to use the phrase... I'm looking forward to throwing it out at a cocktail party...) Furthermore, Startech has licensed technology that isolates hydrogen from the gas products, and plans to sell that in the coming hydrogen economy.

Nice, yes? Time to put StarTech on a watch list? Well...

First, read this excellently detailed post from David Miller of Seeking Alpha. He isolates the challenges faced by Startech as follows:

• Limited board experience: The board of directors has virtually no experience in the market place. Company founder Joe Longo has the most relevant business experience, and that's in waste management.
  
• Reliance on hydrogen in business model: It's going to be a looooooong while before there's a payoff with hydrogen fuel systems.
• Expense acceleration: No argument here about the benefits of disposing of toxic wastes. But storage, transportation, permitting, etc are time consuming and expensive.
  

Furthermore, there's questions regarding ultimately efficiency of this type of technology. Reed Benet at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, who is working on an exothermic variant:

"They essentially make artificial lightening to create high temperatures to gasify lots of things. It’s all great until you consider the huge amount of external electricity you need to use to create artificial lightening. I’ve seen 7% efficiencies for these type of things..."

Not to say that's necessarily the case with Startech. Something to consider, however.