The FASTOX™ Difference

Sierra Energy’s FASTOX™ process has many advantages over other renewable energy technologies, including anaerobic digestion, combustion, incineration, pyrolysis, and even other gasification technologies:

1. FASTOX™ is environmentally friendly and allows 100% recycling without emissions or the production of toxic waste. Most renewable energy technologies, and even other gasifiers, require the sorting of waste and still produce various wastes, such as toxic ashes, that need to be sent to landfills. But Sierra Energy’s FASTOX™ process melts any inorganic materials, such as metal, glass, and minerals, allowing them to be collected and reused. At the same time, FASTOX™ vaporizes any organic materials into a clean and usable syngas, offsetting our world’s need for natural gas and other virgin fossil fuels. And FASTOX™ does this in a way that produces no process emissions or toxic residues, meaning that everything is recycled without causing any problems for our environment and nothing ends up in any landfill.

2.  FASTOX™ has been thoroughly vetted by outside experts. The following experts have confirmed the validity of Sierra Energy’s FASTOX™ process: Dr. Dave Wakelin; Dr. Martin Corbett (now deceased); Dr. Wei-Kao Lu, Metallurgy Professor at McMaster University; and TSS Consultants, Inc. The United States Department of Defense is currently testing a wide variety of waste streams as feedstocks for Sierra Energy’s FASTOX™ process at the Renewable Energy Testing Center at McClellan Park, California. Confidence in Sierra Energy’s FASTOX™ process is further derived from the fact that every subset of the FASTOX process is one that has been independently proven at a commercial scale.

3. FASTOX™ operates continuously with only a 2-5% parasitic electric load. While plasma-arc furnaces can also reach the high temperatures needed to cleanly gasify waste, they are limited to loading waste in batches, meaning that they have to constantly be stopped and restarted between loads. Plasma-arc furnaces also require 25-30% of the energy they produce just to operate, making them fairly inefficient and expensive to operate. But Sierra Energy’s FASTOX™ process allows waste to be loaded in a continuous stream process, allowing a FASTOX™ system to operate for many years without stopping. And FASTOX™ only requires 2-5% of the energy it produces to operate. These differences allow FASTOX™ to recycle dramatically more waste faster, and at a much lower cost, meaning that operations are profitable even without subsidies or carbon credits.

4. FASTOX™ can operate at both large and small scales. Most gasifiers cannot process more than 300 tons of waste per day, meaning that they are not appropriate for towns with more than 50,000 residents. Multiple units have to be strung together to handle any large amounts of waste. Single FASTOX™ units can be sized to process as little as 10 tons of waste per day or more than 25,000 tons of waste per day, making FASTOX™ the only gasifier capable of handling the waste from even the largest major metropolitan areas without the need for multiple units.

5.  FASTOX™ offers retrofit opportunities. FASTOX™ can be applied as a retrofit of existing facilities. Many future FASTOX™ gasification plants essentially already exist and are just waiting to be retrofitted. Sierra Energy can, with an inexpensive retrofit, turn existing idled blast furnaces into commercially viable gasifiers. From a cost and a time-to-market perspective, this in an incredibly powerful advantage. By the time any competing technology is capable of achieving FASTOX™-type scales, FASTOX™ will be firmly established in the marketplace.

6. FASTOX™ is based on proven technology with an established support industry. FASTOX™ is based on blast furnace technology. As blast furnaces have been around for thousands of years, and have changed little over the past 180 years, they are supported by a large, global knowledge base and industry. The costs of building, testing, operating, and maintaining blast furnaces are well understood and have been refined to amazing levels of accuracy and efficiency. The modifications involved in the FASTOX™ process are minimal and well understood, allowing FASTOX™ to capitalize on this existing support and knowledge base.

7. FASTOX™ produces energy efficiently and economically. The thermal efficiency of the FASTOX™ process is upwards of 87%. Not only is the syngas produced suitable for sale, but so are the recycled metals and slags produced by the process. FASTOX™’s clean and continuous operation, low parasitic load, and flexible scalability allow FASTOX™ to produce energy on a cost-per-kilowatt basis that is competitive with current solutions, even as part of a new construction. Those economics improve when FASTOX™ is used to retrofit an idled blast furnace, leveraging existing infrastructure to dramatically reduce construction costs.