CCS's boosters now talk of the first full-scale plant being ready by 2015 or so.
Once it proves it can operate at the scale, it expects to make a larger commercial-scale plant.
We envisage a typical large-scale plant having an average capacity of 10, 000 tonnes of plastic waste per year.
Meanwhile brighter prospects loom eastwards as BP lays the groundwork for a second world-scale plant at their BP Zhuhai site in Guangdong Province, China.
Cellulosic ethanol uses non-food feed stocks with significant greenhouse gas emission reductions, and the first commercial-scale plant is being built today in Soperton, Ga.
If all goes according to plan, Statkraft hopes to have a full-scale plant operational, generating up to 100 megawatts a year within seven years' time.
By tapping some 20 scientists at research centers across Europe, Statkraft eventually found a membrane that can work for a small-scale plant, though it's not quite enough for a larger operation.
They frequently depend on venture-capital funds which are dwarfed by the cost of even a single utility-scale power plant.
More than one million people, it says, will be supplied this summer with water from Britain's first large-scale desalination plant in east London.
In 1959 Toyota's Motomachi factory became Japan's first full-scale car assembly plant.
Ohio-based American Electric Power, the largest consumer of coal in the U.S., is trying to build the country's first super-efficient commercial-scale coal gasification plant.
But although a number of other firms will soon join the race with pilot projects, no full-scale CCS coal plant has yet been commissioned.
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If we can show, for example, that a commercial scale cellulosic biofuel plant in Iowa can succeed, the private sector will likely finance many more of them around the country.
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And now, for the very first time, a large-scale solar power plant -- the largest of its kind in the entire nation -- will deliver electricity produced by the sun to the citizens of the Sunshine State.
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There are still, however many stages from feasibility studies to pilot plant to scale up that will require several more years.
"Yet, we still face a great challenge - a unprecedented challenge in human history to working towards decommissioning the plant in such scale, " he said.
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This plant is a small-scale model of two desalination plants Poseidon is proposing, one for Carlsbad and another for Huntington Beach.
But as new sequencing and information technologies develop, and the cost and speed of large-scale projects fall, more such international plant initiatives may well find their way on to the menu.
Next the company converted the microbe to produce means to create ethanol fuel from plant cellulose, and following scale-up and cost problems, abandoned that dream to focus upon higher cost chemicals used in cosmetics.
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The SARRY system at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is its first large-scale application.
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It's installing a large-scale version of the original system at a plant in Oakville, Ontario--thanks to the generosity of the Canadian government.
So a plant needs to be built at a certain scale in order to recoup the upfront investments and keep the energy production costs down.
"We are working on four small scale forest projects with local community groups to grow and plant over 1, 000, 000 trees to re-store the tree cover in an area now vulnerable to landslides, " he added.
What is the scale-up factor between what they actually demonstrated and what a commercial plant will be?
However, he added that as there were no large-scale biorefineries in operation, the team did have to estimate how much bioethanol such a plant would be able to produce in order to calculate the net energy gain.
Part of the rationale for big government-sponsored rebates on what is an otherwise uneconomic source of power is the strategic benefit of distributing small-scale power generation across the landscape rather than focusing it in a hulking coal or nuclear plant.
While low flow fixtures, rainfall collection, and solar panels help to conserve water and energy, the desalination plant and wind farm that were part of the original plan are the kinds of large-scale facilities that would make this community truly stand out as a worldwide front-runner in sustainability.
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It is converting a fermentation plant in Florida into a test facility to see if what works in the laboratory will work at scale.
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