Gasification, pyrolysis and biological routes that convert solid, liquid and gaseous wastes into hydrogen, syngas, fuels and chemicals, engineered for real feedstock variability, not idealised lab conditions.
Ionect provides engineering and decision-support for waste-to-X projects, converting solid, liquid and gaseous waste streams into hydrogen, syngas, fuels, chemicals and energy. We work with technology developers scaling novel conversion processes and industrials evaluating waste valorisation, focusing on feedstock variability, gas cleanup, and the techno-economics of routes where the input is rarely clean.
What makes waste conversion hard isn't the headline reactor. It's that the feedstock changes, the contaminants change, the gas cleanup has to be over-engineered for the bad days, and the economics only work if the chain hangs together end-to-end. That's where we work.
Two coupled decisions sit at the heart of every waste-conversion project: which route fits the feedstock, and which engineering challenges the feedstock will impose on the chain.
Partial oxidation with O₂ or steam, producing syngas at high temperature.
Thermal decomposition without oxygen, producing bio-oil, char and gas.
Microbial breakdown of organic waste in absence of oxygen.
High-temperature plasma conversion, tolerates difficult mixed streams.
Wet thermal processing under pressure, no drying step needed.
Mixed household and commercial waste, sorted into refuse-derived fuel.
Process residues, off-spec products and non-recyclable byproducts.
Straw, husks, bagasse, forestry thinnings, manure.
Mixed and contaminated plastics not suitable for mechanical recycling.
Biogenic methane streams from digestion or landfill.
Wet organic residue from wastewater treatment.
We are vendor-independent, we help you match the right conversion route to the feedstock you actually have, not the feedstock the brochure assumes.
Structured trade-off across thermal and biological routes against your real feedstock.
Operating windows, buffer storage and turndown engineered for the bad days.
Cleanup trains sized to deliver synthesis-grade gas across the full feedstock envelope.
Coupling waste-derived syngas to e-fuels, hydrogen and chemicals as one chain.
TEA stress-tested against feedstock scenarios, gate fees and policy support.
First-of-a-kind unit engineering, pilot integration and commissioning support.
A novel reactor, a different feedstock window, a better gas cleanup train. We bring chain-level engineering and gas-cleanup pragmatism to your pilot, for DOPS-style developers, novel pyrolysis and gasification start-ups, and biological route developers.
As energy, fuels, hydrogen or chemicals, across waste-management operators, refineries with plastic waste, chemical plants with process residues, and biogas operators upgrading to biomethane or beyond. We screen the routes, stress-test economics against feedstock variability, and produce the engineering basis before you commit.
Gasification with O₂ or steam fits dry, carbon-rich solids. MSW, RDF, biomass, plastics, and produces syngas suitable for synthesis. Pyrolysis suits plastics and biomass when bio-oil or char are valuable products. Anaerobic digestion is the right fit for wet, biological feedstocks (food waste, sludge, agricultural slurries) and yields biogas. Plasma gasification handles difficult mixed streams at higher cost. Hydrothermal routes target wet biomass without prior drying. We screen the routes against the feedstock you actually have, not an idealised composition.
By designing for the bad days, not the brochure. Feedstock characterisation up-front (moisture, ash, chlorides, alkali, sulphur, plastics fraction), explicit operating-window definition, oversized gas cleanup where contaminants are unpredictable, and buffer storage to smooth variability into the conversion step. The economics get stress-tested against feedstock scenarios, not a single design point.
It depends on the feedstock and what happens to the CO₂. Hydrogen from biogenic waste with CO₂ vented can be low-carbon; with the biogenic CO₂ captured and used or stored, it can be net-negative. Hydrogen from fossil-origin waste (e.g. mixed plastics) sits closer to grey or blue hydrogen depending on capture. Lifecycle assessment with honest waste-attribution rules is the only way to settle this for a specific project.
Sometimes. The economics typically lean on three levers: a gate fee for taking the waste, the value of the product (hydrogen, fuel, chemical), and policy support for low-carbon outputs. Projects with a strong gate fee and a high-value product can stand on their own; commodity-product projects generally rely on a combination. We model each lever explicitly so the project's dependency on subsidy is visible.
Each feedstock brings different contaminants, tars, particulates, chlorides, alkali, sulphur, heavy metals, at different concentrations. Downstream synthesis catalysts are intolerant of even trace contaminants, so the cleanup train has to deliver synthesis-grade gas across the worst feedstock days. It's where most waste-conversion projects underestimate engineering scope, and where we spend disproportionate design effort.
Yes. Anaerobic digestion, biogas upgrading and microbial fermentation routes are in scope. The engineering disciplines are different from thermal conversion, but the chain-level questions, feedstock variability, gas cleanup, integration with downstream synthesis or grid, are the same.
The page above is about what Ionect does. The pages below explain the underlying routes, products and economics in depth.
Full pillar, what waste-to-X is, the main routes, products and economics.
ReadWaste-derived syngas is a real feedstock for synthetic fuels.
ReadBiogenic CO₂ from waste streams as a CCU feedstock.
ReadThe method behind the LCOX and feedstock-sensitivity numbers.
Read