SCALABILITY
My name is John Shaw, I am the COO of Eden Energy. I started working on this technology back in 2002 with the original visionary/inventor of the original process, Brian Appel. I met Jonathan Appel, our Founder and CEO of the advanced version of the Eden Energy Process when he was just a young man.
I am from a small Southeast Kansas town where I grew up and graduated from high school. I served for 10 years in the United States Navy where I learned to operate and maintain the main propulsion boilers and all of their sub-systems. I am a plank owner of the USS Missouri BB-63 and a recipient of Navy Achievement Medal along with the Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist designation. My early career taught me about boiler operations and the foundation of leadership plus it thought me what it takes to achieve my goals in life. As I stated above, I started working on this tech back in 2002. I was originally hired on as a shift team leader at the first commercial facility for this budding technology. I quickly rose through the leadership ranks to become the facilities Operations Manager until 2015. All of this was possible because of my drive to learn and ability to apply my life's lessons and experiences in the field of renewable energy and who was also fortunate enough to have many great mentors who helped me to become the leader and teacher I am today.
Ok, enough about me let’s get down to the reason for this blog, Scalability…………
One of the questions asked about our technology “Can it be scaled to fit my needs?” The answer is a resounding “YES!”.How is that possible you ask? Well let’s dive in and see how it is possible. Our technology was literally derived from a concept that we could mimic mother Earths processes that takes organic matters and converts them into hydrocarbons(crude oils) and other products using Pressure, and Time. The first attempt at doing this was with an over-the-counter pressure cooker that fits right on the kitchen counter of any house in the world. What?…. Yes, a simple pressure cooker and the world was changed forever.
The next step was to scale the pressure cooker up in size to process more materials and start diving into the science behind what was taking place in the pressure cooker. A pilot system capable of processing 5 gallons of material at a time was then built. This was a relatively simple jump in size, and it was able to show a lot about what was going on in the conversion process. However, it was not large enough nor complex enough to fully tell what exactly was happening inside the upsized reactor (pressure cooker) so the next steps were taken and a pilot plant facility was built in Philadelphia in 1999.
The pilot plant was capable processing 20 tons of waste per day. It was built on the Philadelphia Naval shipyard where the real work started taking place. A better understanding of how the processes worked within the reactor and the additional tanks and vessels started to develop and a waste to energy process was developed that would change the world forever. In the pilot plant it was learned that different waste mixtures would produce a few different end products but also at the same time create standard products consistently. Based on the initial feedstock mixtures, one could create natural organic fertilizers both in a liquid and or solids form or create a biochar (coal) just by adding or removing different types of feedstocks but consistently create a light sweet crude oil that could be fractionated into everyday forms of energy (Naturalgas, gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and lubricant oils). With all that was learned the next logical step was to build a full-scale waste energy refinery so, one was built.
The large-scale commercial waste to energy refinery was designed to process 250 tons a day of rendering waste from a nearby food processing facility in the small Midwest town of Carthage Missouri, USA. This is where my journey with the Eden Process began. It was built with all the bells and whistles one would expect to see at a refinery. It had feed process areas, feedstock storage, main processing areas and finished product storage areas. The facility was truly awe inspiring to everyone who stepped onsite. It took several years to design and build the facility that was totally based off a pressure cooker and a small 20-ton pilot plant. Here is where the story gets interesting. The facility when it was first turned on didn’t work as it was designed. What?!!! Yes. that is a fact. You see the engineering team assumed the upsizing was linear and guess what, it was not. So, we instead had built a 250 ton a day pilot facility.
Today, because of what we learned in the past we can scale the process to any size needed. From a 1-ton system all the way up to…… well the sky is the limit. Based on what we have learned, we have advanced the process and can scale it up or down using set parameters and process designs that allow our end users to process any type of waste and produce viable sustainable end products.
John Shaw
Founding Partner and COO
