Pre-feasibility Study of a Waste to Energy Plant in Chisinau, Moldova

Abstract: The thesis outlined in this report has been done as a sub-project in cooperation between the municipalities Borlänge in Sweden and Chisinau in Moldova. The project aimed to explore the region's economic and environmental opportunities for waste incineration with energy recovery, also known as Waste to Energy. At present, the solution to the waste situation is unmonitored landfills with smaller sorting operations. Environmentally, this is a poor solution and although there are plans for change, no specific strategy has been presented. Another important issue is Moldova's dependence on foreign produced energy. The country's energy system is dependent on imported natural gas, and only a small part of the country's electrical energy is produced domestically. What makes the waste to energy so interesting for this region is that it contributes to an improvement in both of these issues by using the waste as fuel to reduce energy dependency. The study has been done without specific waste composition data for the Chisinau region. With this in mind a dynamic model in several steps has been made, designed to obtain new results depending on what waste composition is specified. The results of this study show that implementation of a waste incineration plant in the Chisinau energy system is economically and environmentally feasible, given the current conditions. The proposed plant is designed to annually handle 400,000 tonnes of waste, and would with the assumed waste composition deliver 560 GWh of district heat and 260 GWh of electric energy. This production provides an annual profit of 31.6 M €, which gives a positive net present value after the project amortization. Compared with the city's current solution with landfills and gas turbines, the project also provides a significant environmental improvement. During the plant's design lifetime, greenhouse gas emissions are 53.9%, and only 6.8% with the assumption that only a portion of the carbon content of the waste is of fossil origin.