Waste to synthesis gas

Energy recovered from what the world throws away. A waste-fed generator that makes its own fuel gas on site, and gives back electricity, heat and clean water.

Talk to us Read the honest status

Yerevan, Armenia. Demonstrator stage.

The process

Waste in. Power out.

One run of the tower, start to finish.

  1. 01 Feed

    The hopper runs without stopping. Nothing is sorted and nothing is dried first. Damp is fine, up to about a fifth of the charge by weight, and dirty water counts.

  2. 02 Fire

    Briquettes and forced air bring the chamber at the base up to working temperature.

  3. 03 Heat

    The column comes up to heat behind its insulation. Nothing in the tower is under pressure, at any point in the run.

  4. 04 Gas

    Gas leaves the side offtake, cools, and goes to the engine. The engine is what makes the electricity.

  5. 05 Recover

    Nothing leaves unused. The engine's exhaust heat goes back into the base, hot water comes off the top of the stack, and ash drops out of the bottom.

What it accepts

Most waste-to-energy systems
are built for one feedstock. This one takes whatever is locally abundant, so a unit can go where the material already sits instead of a supply chain being built to feed it.

  • Dirty plastic
  • Waste oil
  • Paper and cardboard
  • Sawdust
  • Reed
  • Bamboo
  • Algae
  • Peat
  • Fine coal
  • Farm waste

One requirement, and it is about water rather than about sorting. Damp is fine, up to about a fifth of the charge by weight, and dirty water counts. Free water is not fine. It has to be held in the material rather than running, because water running onto a working base damages it.

What comes back out

  • Electricity
  • Heat and hot water
  • Clean process water
  • Inert ash

Context

Two global problems
that share a map.

The world generates about 2.6 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste a year. By 2050 it will generate 3.9 billion. Roughly 30% is never properly managed. It gets dumped, left uncollected, or burned in the open.

Separately, 730 million people have no access to electricity, and around 2 billion cook without a clean fuel.

These are usually treated as two problems. On a map they are largely the same one. The places with the least waste infrastructure are frequently the places with the least energy infrastructure, and waste is a carbon feedstock.

2.6 Bt
municipal solid waste generated per yearWorld Bank, What a Waste 3.0, 2026
~30%
of it dumped, uncollected, or openly burnedWorld Bank, What a Waste 3.0, 2026
730 M
people without access to electricityIEA, World Energy Outlook 2025
~2 Bn
people without access to clean cookingIEA, World Energy Outlook 2025

The platform

One core process.
Many machines. Pyronyx is not a single product. The same core supports a family of device configurations, sized and shaped to different jobs.

Entry-level

Adamov Furnace

The burner on its own, with the fewest parts and the lowest cost to build. It is also the one that has actually been built and run, which makes it the reference implementation of the core process rather than the commercial endpoint.

Flagship

Adamov Tower

A universal gasifier that runs as an electricity and heat generator on its own, on waste and on cheap hydrocarbon fuel across a wide range. Feed is continuous, and it wants no sorting and no drying. What it gives back is power, heat, clean process water, and the disposal of whatever went into it.

There are no moving parts to speak of, no lubrication, no cooling circuit and no control electronics, and nothing anywhere in it is under pressure. There is very little in it that can break, and very little to learn before running one.

Three sizes

  • Small

    50 to 70 kW

    Three to four metres tall, under a metre across, around 50 kg of feed an hour. Standby and small autonomous power, with heating, disposal and water treatment alongside it. Greenhouses, municipal services, rotational camps, cruise vessels.

  • Medium

    100 to 200 kW

    Five to seven metres tall, 100 to 200 kg of feed an hour, 250 kW at peak. Sized for waste-processing sites, which need hot water, steam and power of their own, and which can make the briquettes and liquid fuel that everything smaller runs on.

  • Third size

    Design only

    A waste plant that is also a power station, two orders of magnitude above the medium unit. It exists as a design and as a direction, and it is not on the table until everything in the two sizes above has been proven.

Every figure above is a design specification. They are what the machines are being built to, not what any of them has been measured at. The Status section says which is which.

Where it goes

Bring the recovery
to the material. Waste is expensive to move and cheap to leave still. Small autonomous units invert the centralised model: site the unit where the material already is, and treat energy independence and waste handling as one purchase rather than two.

  • Generation where the waste is madeSited at the point the waste is produced, or at the first place it piles up, rather than at the grid
  • Off-grid and standby powerSettlements, greenhouses, municipal services, rotational camps and disaster zones
  • Diesel engine retrofitConverting existing large diesel engines to gas-diesel operation
  • Marine power plantsVessel-scale generation, including plastic recovered at sea
  • Waste-processing centresMaking the briquettes and liquid fuel that the smaller units elsewhere run on

Status

Where this actually is.

  • A demonstrator exists. Prototype units have been built and run.
  • The project is pre-commercial. Nothing is for sale.
  • Every number on this page is a design specification. Heights, feed rates and outputs are what the machines are being built to. None of them is a measured result.
  • Performance has not been measured by a third party. Closing that gap is the next piece of work.
  • The Ultragenerator is parked. It is the earlier and narrower machine this work came out of. It needs gas delivered under pressure, a casing that holds its shape at temperature under that pressure, and control electronics, none of which is where a small team should spend first. Work stopped on it so the Tower could be simplified toward the two jobs that are actually asked for.
  • R&D has been privately funded so far. No external capital has been raised.
  • Incorporation in Armenia is in progress.

What we are looking for

  1. A research partner for independent characterisation. A university group or national laboratory willing to instrument the demonstrator and measure it. Until someone outside the project has measured it, none of this is worth much to anyone, us included.
  2. Pre-seed and commercialisation support. Funding and operating help to take a working demonstrator toward a specified, manufacturable unit.

Contact

If any of this
is your field, write. The most useful conversations right now are with people running combustion or gasification groups, and with investors who write pre-seed cheques in deep tech.

marc.petrosyan@gmail.com

Marc Petrosyan

Project manager, Yerevan and Sydney

Data Science, American University of Armenia. Handles partnerships, applications and international development. English and Russian.