Life cycle costing for plasma gasification of municipal solid waste: A socio-economic approach

Fossil fuels contribute to climate changes, negatively affecting the environment. Waste has been seen as a possible resource for energy production, constituting a cleaner alternative to replace non-renewable fuels through waste-to-energy (WtE) techniques. Plasma gasification is a procedure that decomposes the molecules at high temperatures, affording a synthetic gas (syngas) that can further produce electricity, fuels and chemicals. Within the most used WtE technologies, plasma gasification is recent and therefore not yet widely applied. Thus, a viability study to support the thorough understanding and implementation of this treatment is required. This paper assesses the socio-economic aspects of plasma gasification promoting a more sustained waste management system, also taking advantage of the commodity assets granted by the technique. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that an importance-fulfilment matrix is specifically developed to appraise the socio-economic viability of plasma gasification, combining environmental, technical, economic and social aspects. Although depicting high capital costs, plasma gasification enabled high revenues, rebating the operational costs. The sensitivity analysis exhibited a descending impact in the profitability of the plant for varying electricity sales price, landfill fee, discount rate, vitrified slag sales price and initial investment.