The commercial history of waste gasification.
Gasification is old technology — and most of what people call “new” is a re-run of a lesson the industry has learned before: a reactor works in a pilot long before it works at commercial scale, and the gap between the two has buried a lot of capital.
§ A short timeline
| Era | Where the technology stood |
|---|---|
| 1800s | Town gas from coal establishes the principle — partial oxidation of carbon to syngas — later applied to waste. |
| 1960s–70s | First waste-fed thermal processing systems; tire carbonisation and plastic-to-oil processors enter service. |
| 1970s–80s | Continuous gasification-melting is developed for mixed industrial and automotive waste; a tire-to-oil processor wins a national technology award in 1983. |
| 1990s–2000s | Municipal-scale gasification-melting matures in Japan — the MHI and Kobelco systems scale to hundreds of tonnes a day and hundreds of plants. |
| 2010s | The plasma boom and bust: Alter NRG / Westinghouse plasma is scaled to the world’s largest gasifiers at Teesside and fails; Air Products writes down ~$1 billion and exits. |
| 2010s–20s | Biomass gasification matures (Andritz, Valmet) while smaller waste-gasification ventures stall — Enerkem retired and insolvent by 2025, EQTEC restructured in 2026. |
§ The lesson of forty years
The technologies that survived commercial scale share three traits: owned engineering (not re-badged third-party kit), operating references (not renderings), and feed tolerance — the ability to take the variable, contaminated waste industry actually produces. The ones that didn’t survive almost universally failed on the second: they were sold on a drawing before they had run a plant. No ranking can predict the next failure; a credible one can at least tell you which companies have already cleared the bar.
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