In the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), most countries face the challenges of municipal waste collection and disposal. The ECOWAS Regional Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE) has recently opened an Expression of Interest (EoI) call for the Development of Municipal Waste to Energy Projects for Cleaner Cities Initiative in the ECOWAS region.
Most of these countries in the ECOWAS region face the challenges of municipal waste collection and disposal. While the municipalities continue facing the challenges of waste management, the urban populations however continue to grow by the day and thereby compounding the existing problems.
The challenges of municipal waste management are characterized by the lack of adequate and sustainable infrastructural services, especially in the new and ever-expanding settlements. One of the services severely hampering the development of these expanding settlements is the unavailability of adequate energy services.
This results in inadequate energy services and hence rationing of the available resource through frequent power outages. Other infrastructural services such as roads, water, and telecommunication services are equally hampered by the expanding urban populations.
Energy from waste could resolve several issues
The expanding urban populations contribute to current waste management problems as well. The municipalities, who have the ardent task of keeping the cities clean, face numerous challenges in the collection, transportation, and disposal of the waste, that is either incinerated in open dumpsites or left in the open without any proper management system.
To address these problems, ECREEE wants to explore various waste management options that could generate energy from the ‘waste’. These options include:
- Direct combustion of the waste to generate steam in boilers for electricity generation;
- Use of gasification/pyrolytic furnaces to generate steam in boilers for electricity generation;
- Landfill Gas (LFG) requires special preparation of land to be filled with MSW to produce gas that can be used for power generation or otherwise. It requires engineering skills in the preparations to ensure successful operation and the capture of the gas;
- Biogas from bio-digesters from sorted vegetative waste. The gas can be used for power generation or otherwise.
In this context, ECREEE intends to select a maximum of six waste-to-energy (WTE) projects from municipal waste from cities in ECOWAS member states to carry out pre-feasibility studies.
The deadline for the receipt of Expression of Interest (EoI) is August 28, 2020.
