Two of VISTA’s primary transformational technologies are its True Gasification (TG) technology and the other is its true BES technology working together to complete our URC projects. With at least 6 (six) United States patents and several international and domestic patent-pending technologies, VISTA engineers have developed the most innovative and profitable solutions to global waste problems.
Our “Thermal True Gasification” system converts or cooks (using heat only) various waste streams, such as: municipal solid waste, tires, waste coal, sludge, plastics, biomass and other hydro-carbon based materials into electricity, thermal energy, and other usable by-products, while emitting no harmful pollutants. Over the last 28 plus years, more than 30 demonstrations sites worldwide have tested a wide variety of local feedstock’s to prove the viability of our thermal gasification system. These demonstration sites ran from a couple of months to one test which lasted 16 years. A full scale operation ran successfully for 2 years in Europe. All of these tests lead to our third (3rd generation) system which has zero emissions from the entire true gasification conversion process which NOW exceeds all global standards. European Union Certification occurred in 2000 with a plant in Ireland that ended up setting the EU standards that currently exist today.
With our TG of municipal solid waste (“MSW”), industrial waste, low grade medical waste, agricultural waste or any hydrocarbon-based waste materials results in a thermal decomposition of the refuse derived fuel (”RDF”) into a fuel gas which is commonly known as Syngas. This Syngas can be used to fuel a generator to produce electricity for operating the facility (approximately 1MWh parasitic load), and sell the remaining 14 MWh of electricity generated back to the local grid or such syngas (2nd process) can be converted to make an alternative fuel which is a high octane liquid fuel we call – Green Liquid Gold (GLG).
Utilizing this second process similar to Fischer-Tropsch, VISTA along with its affiliates have developed various processes that are more efficient and have NO SULFER issues unlike the current Fischer-Tropsch processes in use today that do experience an issue with SULFER when converting the Syngas into a liquid fuel or other by-products. Our TG technology and syngas conversion process combination are our core product lines which will provide for the highest percentage of net revenue for our shareholders and partners.
The USA alone has 3,091 active landfills and over 10,000 old municipal landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Our primary source of feedstock for the URC projects is from current USA waste production. The benefit to each community will be no waste going to any landfill sites where a VISTA project is located. Our secondary and greatest future opportunity will be to mine these existing sites and recycle waste, tires and other hydrocarbon waste into our GLG by-products and the generation of electrical power going to the local power grid.
In the future, the mining of existing landfills will become a key component of VISTA and we envision URC’s to be built on existing landfill sites around the world. Many domestic and international companies along with communities have agreed to provide as much hydrocarbon rich waste steams to our URC facilities within our URC business model as we can handle. Each URC project will begin full production approximately 26 months from the start of the project on a green field site, and retrofitting projects usually starting production within 18 months of the project start date. VISTA’s URC technology is a modular design which allows us the capability to install URC TG units as they are delivered to the site and start operations as soon as the first system is on line. Systems can continue to be installed without interruption to the plant until all systems are in place. All plants will function under a “Zero Carbon” emissions initiative.