FUELING INDUSTRIES

CLEANING IT UP

Where does 5% of global carbon emissions come from? If you guessed garbage, you’re correct. But there’s no prize, because even if you’re recycling, odds are where you live, only a percentage of what you toss in that special bin is actually repurposed. In the US, for instance, it's shockingly less than 10%.

On the other side of the world, Australia can claim nearly half. Still not good enough. Despite our efforts, emissions from rotting garbage are predicted to grow to more than 8% by 2050.

In densely populated areas around the world, the massive amounts of what many call municipal solid waste, or MSW, are typically incinerated. Across suburban and rural areas, where smaller scales make that technology unsuitable, the real problem is festering, in open landfills or hauled away by truck after truck to regional burn facilities.

If only there was a machine where all the recyclables and garbage went in one end and clean energy came out the other...and it was carbon negative.

That’s no exaggeration of the MIHG process – Moving Injection Horizontal Gasification - developed and patented by Wildfire Energy.

Learning from non-renewables

Based in Brisbane, the startup has its genesis in the fossil fuel industry, where its founders realized they could leverage their expertise into a solution to help supply the massive flow of clean energy needed for the net zero transition.

CEO Greg Perkins is quick to credit Denis Doucet, now CTO, with coming up with the idea. Grant Bollaert is leading engineering, bringing his experience in project startups in oil and gas and petrochemicals. All three are engineers who worked in energy production that involves gasification, the basis of the MIHG process.

Perkins was CTO of a company that developed a novel gasification technology, and got a PhD in that process of converting biomass into an energy-rich gas. While later working for Shell in Europe and Malaysia, his job included commercializing …