FastOx gasification

Sierra Energy is a privately-owned waste-to-energy gasification company. The company claims that its FastOx gasification system can take virtually any trash and turn it into clean energy, without burning. Sierra Energy is a division of Sierra Railroad and is headquartered at the Sierra Energy Research Park in Davis, California.

FastOx gasification was discovered by two steel industry engineers, initially to produce iron in an efficient and environmentally friendly way. They quickly realized the technology could convert a wide variety of waste streams into clean energy. The gasifier concept was entered in the UC Davis Graduate School of Business' 2002 Big Bang! Business Competition. The concept easily won the People’s Choice Award, as well as catching the eye of Mike G. Hart, a local railroad company CEO and a judge at the competition.

After securing rights to the technology, Hart founded a division of Sierra Railroad to use this technology to create clean fuel for his fleet of locomotives. Sierra Energy was then developed with the help of experts in the energy, power, and steel industries. In 2009, the technology was selected for construction and testing at the U.S. Army’s Renewable Energy Testing Center at McClellan Business Park, an independent testing facility funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

In 2013, the DoD, aided by grant funding from the California Energy Commission, entered into an agreement with Sierra Energy for the construction of a modularized FastOx gasifier, known as the FastOx Pathfinder, at U.S Army Garrison Fort Hunter Liggett in Monterey County, California. That facility was built in the spring of 2017 and is now in commissioning.

The Sierra Energy FastOx gasifier is a modified blast furnace design that is capable of accepting municipal waste consisting of organic and inorganic materials. The gasifier operates similar to a blast furnace and is very robust in its ability to accept a wide range of charge materials while producing a syngas of acceptable quality to produce liquid fuels or generate electricity.

The Pathfinder system is a 20-metric-tons per day waste gasification system that uses a patented high-temperature thermochemical conversion process to break down waste at the molecular level, efficiently converting virtually any waste into renewable electricity. Sierra's compact and streamlined Pathfinder system consists of containerized modules. The process begins with waste being fed in through the top of the refractory-lined gasifier shell, with oxygen and steam injected in at the bottom. The design allows the entire process to occur within a single vessel with no internal moving parts, minimizing maintenance and increasing uptime. This process has no toxic byproducts that require disposal.