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PEM^TM systems provide a revolutionary way of dealing with two very pressing problems faced by today's society: waste treatment and disposal, and clean sources of energy. The Company believes the PEM^TM system is superior to competing methods of waste treatment and disposal because of its economic and environmental advantages and its potential to be used across a wide variety of applications, including distributed power production. These advantages provide lower waste processing costs for the customer, optional on-site power generation, greater utilization of waste materials for commercial products, valuable secondary revenue streams from these products, environmentally friendly operations and minimized future liability for the waste. The historically dominant industry treatment methods, incineration and landfilling, cannot make these claims. As a result, customers located globally seeking waste treatment services are turning more readily to new methods of waste management. IET's PEM^TM systems are the best available alternative.

The PEM™ system uses heating from electrically conducting gas (a plasma) in a special gasification system to convert wastes to valuable products. PEM™ systems are highly effective in processing a wide variety of waste streams, including hazardous, medical, radioactive, industrial, municipal and tire wastes. The systems are also highly capable of creating commercially valuable products from waste in the form of energy (ultra-clean power generation using the hydrogen-rich gas) and useful solid byproducts (roofing tiles, insulating panels, sand-blasting media and other construction-related products). The environmental attractiveness of the PEM™ system results from nearly total destruction of organic materials (high volume and weight reduction) and very low emission of hazardous air pollutants. The very low emissions improve the likelihood of obtaining air permit and achieving public acceptance.

In addition to providing cost effective, environmentally responsible treatment and extraction of value from waste, the PEM™ system can be used as part of a distributed power production system. Depending on the waste stream, the larger PEM systems can produce considerably more power than they consume. Such combined systems can be installed in a variety of locations to provide local power and eliminate service interruptions and at stable cost. Because a portion of the fuel is waste, costs can be contained and kept competitive. These combined PEM-GEN™ systems can solve two problems - waste treatment and disposal and electricity supply - in a simple, effective manner.

An alternate option to electric power generation is to extract hydrogen from the syngas for local hydrogen transportation or fuel cell uses. Under this configuration, the PEM™ becomes a source of distributed hydrogen. IET has demonstrated the production of hydrogen from syngas using a PSA (pressure swing adsorption) unit with purity greater than 99.999%. The remaining carbon monoxide from the PSA tail gas can be used in a appropriately sized genset for power production.

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