I’m a fan of plasma gasification it’s the next level up from just incineration for steam and electricity. With plasma you get clean syngas and you can do some neat things once you have clean syngas. The obvious choice is run a combined cycle gas turbine at 60% eff twice what a steam plant would do.
Another choice is turn the syngas via Iron catalysts to C1-C4 alkanes and alkenes that’s methane(natural gas),ethane, ethylene(HDPE,LDPE),propane,propylene(polymers),butane,butene(more polymers,all synthetic oils). Of course any of the C1-4 can be hydrated to their alcohols(methanol,ethanol,isopropyl,butanol).
Gas fermentation technology is mature with a number of industrial scale companies.LanzaTech is the world leaders and they have engineered microbes that eat carbon monoxide and hydrogen and make 150 different chemicals including complete proteins, starch or sugars and lipids. Read that as complete food for animals or even people.
Of course you could just go old.skool and use cobalt catalysts to do the WWII German thing and make long chain alkanes C6-10 is petrol, C10-16 is jet fuel and C16-20 is diesel. C20+ is a fine lubricant base stock and wax. Once you have syngas any hydrocarbon is just some chemistry away. Add in nitrogen from the air and proteins are in reach too.
https://netl.doe.gov/research/Coal/energy-systems/gasification/gasifipedia/westinghouse
Sorry, I only took Inorganic Chemistry. About 42 years ago.
You lost me.
All I know is they burn our trash at a Wheelabrator Technologies plant in NH. There are multiple plants like that up here in New England. Basically because all the landfills are full except way up in Maine or northern NH.
FYI, I was very glad when a neighboring town finally closed their landfill. That is because there was a flock of seagulls that hung out on the lake near my house. They would go over to the landfill and eat all day then come back and hang out on the lake at night. This was a lake 60 miles from the ocean. When they closed the landfill the seagulls left.