Don’t need money, just your garbage, company tells Cedar Rapids

It's not every day that someone with a tantalizing PowerPoint presentation shows up at City Hall and says he doesn't need your money, just your garbage.

So it was on Thursday as Jim Juranitch, co-founder and president/CEO of Plasma Power LLC, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., met with the City Council to talk about his firm's plan to build a $100-million-plus power plant in Marion that will be fueled largely with natural gas and partly with energy produced by zapping garbage.

Juranitch already has dazzled the Marion City Council and a Marion-heavy citizen group, wastenotIOWA, with the garbage-zapping technology called plasma arc. Just last month, the Marion council provided Plasma Power a good-faith grant of $95,000 to express its support for the power-plant project.

In his presentation on Thursday and afterward, Juranitch emphasized that his company intended to use its own financial wherewithal to obtain bank financing for the power plant, the cost of which he said the company hoped to lessen by securing available Midwest Disaster Area Bonds.

“So what do you want from us?” council member Chuck Swore asked Juranitch.

Juranitch said banks will want to know at least two things: Will the new plant be able to secure a dependable flow of garbage to zap? And will the company be able to sell the electricity the new plant generates?

He told the City Council that his firm has talked to power companies in Iowa that may be interested in the electricity.

As for the garbage, the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency - the Cedar Rapids council controls six of nine seats on the agency's board - takes in about 600 tons of garbage a day, Karmin McShane, the agency's executive director, told the council on Thursday. Of that amount, about 100 tons, five days a week, comes from residential garbage picked up in Cedar Rapids and Marion. The rest comes from commercial haulers.

Juranitch said his proposal for a Marion power plant calls for a setup that zaps 250 tons of garbage a day, seven days a week, which he said is an amount that would produce about 18 percent of the plant's energy. Additionally, he said his proposal would charge haulers the same or better rates for garbage that the Solid Waste Agency's landfill, which is $38 a ton.

McShane, though, emphasized that much of what the agency charges for garbage is needed to fund recycling, compost and education programs, the implication being that the Solid Waste Agency board would need to grapple with how it would fund such efforts with much of the agency's garbage going to the plasma arc facility.

Juranitch said recycling could be a component of the plasma-arc plant.

City Manager Jeff Pomeranz wondered why no cities in the United States now use plasma-arc technology to dispose of municipal waste, and Juranitch said his firm just figured out how to make it work.

The key, he said, is to build a power plant that operates predominately on conventional fossil fuels with a partial mix of syngas produced by the plasma-arc technology.

In and off itself, syngas provides a third less heat than natural gas and requires a plant with a specific kind of turbine. By blending the syngas with natural gas, a conventional turbine can be used to make the operation cost-effective, he said.

Juranitch will return in mid-month to speak to the Solid Waste Agency board.

In the end, the power plant's prospects will depend on the company's ability to obtain its own financing.

Juranitch expressed confidence that would happen.

Council member Justin Shields asked Juranitch about a recent lawsuit filed against him and another firm which he heads up, Global Energies. The lawsuit comes from a former partner.

Juranitch told Shields the lawsuit had no merit, and after the meeting, he said he the litigation would not Plasma Power's ability to secure funding for the Marion project.

He said he hoped to break ground on the Marion project later this year and be up and running in 2013.