Carbon footprints and credits. Renewable Fuel Standards (RFP). Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). Renewable Energy Standards (RES). American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. New EPA and DOE standards and regulations. The list of programs and requirements grows longer each month. Add to those the dozens of actions taken by individual state legislatures. Add to that the ongoing initiatives being adopted in Europe, Canada and a host of other countries.

All developed nations are taking major steps toward a new energy future. Following years of debate and study, lawmakers in Washington D.C. and around the world are writing and implementing legislation to encourage, and often mandate, the use of renewable resources for energy production. This is often done without focusing on technologies that can offer the scale and cost to compete with traditional fossil fuels.

This push for environmental stewardship, coupled with economic drivers, is rapidly changing the landscape for any utility, business or institution currently tied to the use of fossil fuels as their primary energy source. Indeed, all those whose livelihood and/or very existence depend on a consistent source of fuel are faced with making important choices in the very near future.

Beyond the economic investment required for conversion to alternative energy sources, the sheer lack of availability of technology and proven equipment to harness reliable power from wind and solar resources alone presents an often-insurmountable barrier.

While the media has focused attention on a few huge wind farms, massive solar arrays, tidal generators and other “newsworthy” efforts, a group of scientists from Associated Physics of America (APA) has revolutionized the renewable landscape by both improving and up-scaling the well-known process of downdraft gasification. This gasification process that produces a combustible gas through a physical and chemical phase change was virtually abandoned 50 years ago with the advent of cheap oil.

Solving the scaling issues that confined the previous downdraft configurations to small residential and automotive use has allowed PHG Energy’s Process Heat Gasifiers (PHG) to move effectively into large industrial applications and bring key attributes:

• The new technology and equipment has been thoroughly tested and proven in industrial applications.
• Biomass and other feedstock to fuel the process are readily available and renewable.
• Pollution from the gaseous fuel production process is practically non-existent.
• The resulting fuel burns as cleanly as natural gas.
• Projects that can be economically viable regardless of incentives.
• The next generation of biofuels is already here.  The equipment and technology to implement this energy production source is proven and available.

Companies adapting this technology will be leaders as the movement toward a true green-energy economy continues. And they will be true stewards of our environment.

Available. Proven. Renewable. Environmentally friendly. Economically viable. These are more than the latest buzzwords; they describe what PHG Energy brings to its customers today.

More information available at the US DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy website