Dr. Wilson, would you care to comment on that?

Dr. WILSON. That is correct.

Mr. McCORMACK. It would be operating money for the present? Dr. WILSON. Yes.

Dr. KANE. Yes.

Mr. McCORMACK. For Isabelle we would have to line item some money for A. & E. at this time, to specifically put it in the budget?

Dr. KANE. That is correct. We have already spent some money from our operating funds, both our operating funds for research and from what we call our construction planning; the money we put in advance of construction has been spent. But to further it would take construction money.

Chairman McCORMACK. OK. Fine.

I want to thank you gentlemen for coming today and helping us out. Your testimony has been very helpful and very much appreciated. The committee will be looking, as you know, and working on the budget next week. We hope to report something out that everyone will be happy with. Thank you very much.

Before we adjourn now, I'd like to turn to Dr. Mannella from the Energy Research and Development Administration, who was requested to come back and talk with us a little bit more.

It is my understanding that recently Messrs. Goldwater, Fish, and Ottinger requested that Dr. Mannella come back and try to help provide additional understanding of the budget request for the Conservation.

CONSERVATION CONTINUED

Dr. MANNELLA. I'm prepared to respond to questions that are asked, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. GOLDWATER. Mr. Chairman, I have a series of questions and I'd like to get right into them, many of which I probably will have to submit for the record to get some response because of the details. I don't want to monopolize the time, so I'll ask a few questions to start things off and maybe Mr. Fish might have some.

Mr. FISH. I would appreciate that.

Mr. GOLDWATER. I know Dick Ottinger was interested in asking some questions. We're trying to track him down.

Dr. MANNELLA. Fine.

Mr. GOLDWATER. What is the capability of the ERDA organization. to absorb these significant increases, specifically experienced staff contract execution, and program maturity?

Dr. MANNELLA. Mr. Goldwater, I think in terms of the contracting question, that within the scope of the overall ERDA budget and the overall ERDA operation, the increases that we see here today are not going to pose any significant problem.

Within the Office of Conservation, we do require some additional staffing, and have made requests to the Office of the Administrator. The increase in staffing does not stem solely from the increase in the requested budget, but also from the fact that this office has really never been adequately staffed. This is because conservation is a relatively young program area, one that encompasses the end-use programs, which are close to the consumer and the individual citizen. We get an inordinate amount of mail and inquiries which adds to our workload.

Mr. McCORMACK. If the gentleman will bear with us, we're going to go over to the floor to vote and come right back. We will recess for a few minutes. If there are two consecutive votes, and there could be, we'll be gone for about 20 minutes. If not, we'll come back in 7 or 8. [Recess.]

Mr. McCORMACK. The subcommittee will resume its deliberations. Mr. GOLDWATER. Mr. Chairman, I'll yield to Mr. Fish. He has a few questions.

Mr. McCORMACK. Mr. Fish, do you wish to proceed with your ques

tions?

Mr. FISH. Thank you.

Dr. Mannella, during the markup that we anticipate next week on the ERDA authorization bill, I plan to offer an amendment that will establish a demonstration program for the construction of solid waste disposal plants which would have as a primary byproduct energy or energy-intensive products.

With this in mind, I'd appreciate asking you a few questions and elicit your comments.

Dr. MANNELLA. Yes.

Mr. FISH. Would you mind giving the committee an overview of the state of development of these types of solid waste disposal units, and which systems you believe are ready for demonstration?

Dr. MANNELA. Mr. Fish, there are various types of units or generic types of processes, that could be used to convert municipal solid wastes to energy or an energy-rich product.

The first one is combustion, merely burning the material either singly or mixed together with some other form of fuel. This is a technology that is certainly quite well understood, and is indeed in practice.

The second basic generic type of technology involved is pyrolysis, which is the breakdown of the waste material under the action of heat. And, again, this type of technology is generally within the state-ofthe-art.

Beyond these there are several others. There's anaerobic digestion of municipal solid waste to produce methane-rich gas. This is a technology which, for example, we will be researching in a plant in Pompano Beach, Fla. We broke ground for this plant about a month ago and hope when it is operational to collect operating data on the characteristics and the quality of the gas produced.

Another basic type of technology is enzymatic hydrolysis, the use of enzymes to break down the solid waste into something like glucose, which then can be fermented to produce ethyl alcohol or material of that sort. This is still in the R. & D. stage and is not ready for any imminent demonstration.

That's a very quick overview. I'd be happy to supply more material if you would care for it.

Mr. FISH. Well, I understand, sir, there are some plants in place at this time. You mentioned the one at Pompano Beach. I had in mind one such as the Baltimore plant, that is experiencing difficulties-and I gather this isn't the only one that's experiencing difficulties. Could you give us your assessment of these plants?

Dr. MANNELLA. I really don't have detailed knowledge of that particular facility, and I think that perhaps any detailed accounting of

the experience and perhaps the problems would be best addressed to the groups that were involved-which included EPA, the city of Baltimore, the State of Maryland, and the Monsanto Co. We are, of course, following most of these activities because of our general interest in this area. It does appear that the scale-up that was involved in the Baltimore facility-they scaled up from the laboratory about 22 times to the commercial-sized plant-did cause some problems.

When I answered your previous question, Mr. Fish, and give you a brief sort of status of the generic technology, I was really speaking to the technology per se. That's not to say in any given application or any given undertaking that if due care is not exercised with regard to the design and the very specific characteristics of the site or the particular operations, that one might experience difficulties in putting one of these units into operation. However the basic technology as it regards combustion and pyrolysis is understood.

Mr. FISH. Well, such difficulties as the design difficulties would be inherent in any technology or demonstration; is that correct?

Dr. MANNELLA. That is correct.

Mr. Fish. Dr. Mannella, what is the economic viability and the capital costs of the systems that you feel are ready for demonstration? Dr. MANNELLA. Our studies seem to indicate that overall on a lifecycle-cost basis the conversion of municipal solid waste to energy, or an energy-rich product, is indeed economical and attractive. I do have some figures on the general cost of these kinds of units.

For example, pyrolysis systems can be expected to cost in terms of capital investment $30,000 to $50,000 per ton per day. That is a 1,000-ton-per-day unit would cost between $40 million and $50 million to construct. That's probably a typical size and a typical cost, although it can vary quite a bit, depending upon the site, because these plants are site specific.

The activity, for example, that we've been working on with the city of Seattle, Wash., which would be an ammonia-producing plant, consuming 1,500 tons per day of waste, is estimated to cost $120 million. Mr. FISH. Could you give us a capital cost for anything else besides the pyrolysis?

Dr. MANNELLA. The least expensive form of handling municipal solid waste and deriving some useful product from it is preprocessing or mechanical separation. That is to take the waste and divide it into a fuel-rich cut and a metal fraction, which would have considerable value for the metals that it contained.

These largely mechanical preprocessing plants cost about $15,000 to $20,000 per ton per day. They are a necessary adjunct to any of the other kinds of technology that I've talked about, the combustion technology or the pyrolysis technology, so that the figure that I quoted you for the pyrolysis unit included the $15,000 to $20,000 per ton per day for the necessary preprocessing or mechnical separation, which you would do before you went into a further conversion step.

Mr. FISH. Dr. Mannella, would you mind giving the committee some suggestions as to how you feel such demonstration projects might be supported?

Dr. MANNELLA. I feel that the first ingredient, a very necessary ingredient, is that ERDA has to have a base technology program which will give us laboratory and in small-scale unit experience. There really

is no industry per se which is going to make investments in research and development in this area and develop the technology and take it through the pilot plant scale.

When one looks at the demonstration of any of these technologies in a community, in the real world so to speak. Our experience is that the initial cost of these plants is a substantial burden for the community to assume, vis-a-vis other alternatives which they might have for the disposal of the muncipial solid wastes-the use of landfill, or other options.

It's perhaps difficult for the community and the community executive, to get beyond the very large first cost for the construction of the facility. Some means of getting the community over that first-cost hurdle, and perhaps minimizing the impact of this kind of expenditure would appear to enhance the possibilities of the demonstration plants. Mr. FISH. Thank you very much, Dr. Mannella.

Thank you, Mr. Goldwater.

Mr. GOLDWATER. Dr. Mannella, the last time that you were hereand unfortunately I was not able to be present you were not able to respond to specific questions concerning the 100-percent increase in the conservation budget request.

Just carrying on with this question of urban waste, one of the things that puzzles me is why is the urban waste category increased by a lesser amount than other activities in the budget? It looks to me like about a 60-percent increase, whereas many other things have a higher figure. I say this in light of the fact that we've had continuing pressure for larger urban waste programs.

Dr. MANNELLA. Mr. Goldwater, the way that we built this budget stems back to last summer, when we developed the budget which we felt was the local logical growth of the fiscal year 1977 appropriation figure we received, the budget that you have in front of you now is that budget plus the addition of the money for the Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Act and the Energy Extension Service.

What we did was to emphasize the end-use areas in the development of the budget process; that is, transportation, community energy systems, and industry. Within those end-use areas, we tried to allocate according to the potential that we saw for each of the program activities.

The increase that we have slated for the urban waste area, which is primarily to develop the several new technologies of enzymatic hydrolysis and anaerobic digestion, is a pretty substantial one.

Mr. GOLDWATER. Is this based on somewhat subjective judgment, or is there analytical detail to support?

Dr. MANNELLA. There is both to a certain extent.

Mr. GOLDWATER. What's the relationship between this program and EPA's program under Public Law 94-580, as well as the Resource Conservation Recovery Act of 1976, and the $4 billion increase in the urban waste programs under the local public works project funding for 1978? How does all this tie in together?

Dr. MANNELLA. We have an interagency agreement with EPA on the subject of solid waste, and have been working with them to develop a single national program, recognizing the complementary interests that we both have. We are primarily concerned with the

conversion of solid waste to energy, which is one possible option that a community might have for disposing of or utilizing its solid waste. In other words, the solid waste problem per se is a broader mix of activities than simply energy from waste.

Mr. GOLDWATER. And you have this fully coordinated with this interagency group?

Dr. MANNELLA. We are still working on some of the coordination techniques and some of the program development activities that are necessary. I can't honestly say that it is completely coordinated at this time. We are working on it. We've made a lot of progress since last summer.

Mr. GOLDWATER. One thing that concerns me about the 100-percent increase where does this take us in the out years, as far as budgetary requests? Have you projected that? Have you projected the budgets for 1979, 1980, and 1981, and what specifically have you come up with? What are we going to be faced with in those budgets?

Dr. MANNELLA. I really don't have any firm numbers that I can give you for the out-year projections. In the development of all the budgets. However, this is still a relatively young program and some of the areas that we encompass, have potential demonstrations of considerable dollar magnitude, however we're not sure of the extent. of the Federal versus industrial involvement. I cannot give you a good number as to what the out-year costs might be.

Mr. GOLDWATER. Do we even know for 1979? Are we going to expect a doubling in 1979? It seems to me we have to know where you're going and what the costs will be. It's good to be able to start these things, but we must know the impact on future budgets.

Dr. MANNELLA. We are just now getting involved in the early part of our fiscal year 1979 planning. I don't at this time contemplate a doubling in 1979, but I'm not really in a position to tell you what the fiscal guidance will be for 1979.

Mr. GOLDWATER. We're going to be committeed to demonstration programs which will call for sizeable expenditures. Do you even project these?

Dr. MANNELLA. No, because as I mentioned it's not really clear yet what the extent of Federal involvement will be in some of these demonstrations. We are getting into really new areas, and to what extent the industry will underwrite these costs or cost-share is not yet clear. Mr. GOLDWATER. In other words, we're concerned about facilities and long-term contracts, things like that. We increase or double the budget, but we don't really know where we're going.

Dr. MANNELLA. Well, I think we know where we're going because we can certainly relate to the budget, its size, the complements, and what not, to projected energy savings, for example.

Mr. GOLDWATER. Well, it appears to me we're kind of flying blind right now. I recognize that the administration is putting a great deal of emphasis on conservation in the near term area of our energy problems, and I would suspect that these programs that have been identified by ERDA will be candidates for consideration.

It's disturbing though, that even as worthy as they may appear at first blush that we begin budgeting and committing ourselves without knowing what's the costs will be in the out years. That is disturbing, but I guess we're going to have to learn to live with it until we can come up with long-term projections.