Newswise — Climate change is all over the news, and greenhouse gases have been identified as the prime culprit. Many industries fear that reducing their emissions means reducing profits. But advances in technology may help assuage their fears.

Alain Castro, the CEO of Ener-Core, Inc., a company based in Irvine, CA, is at the forefront of innovation in this area. He has spent the vast majority of his career developing, financing and building new power generation plants, as well as optimizing older energy infrastructure assets across many countries throughout Europe, Latin America and North America. Now at Ener-Core, he is commercializing a technology that takes low-quality greenhouse gases (waste gases) and turns them into clean energy that a business can use on-site or sell for a profit—all while using its current infrastructure.

Ener-Core’s Power Oxidizer, which has been issued 17 patents to date, converts waste gases such as methane into useful heat and power. It provides a compelling value proposition to industrial companies that need to curb emissions by enabling an attractive return on investment through the productive use of their emissions to generate energy. This technology has already been deployed commercially, and the company is now ramping up in collaboration with manufacturers of gas turbines and reciprocating engines including Dresser-Rand and Flex Energy. The company also in the process of creating partnerships with other similar multinationals. In January 2015, Inc. magazine named Ener-Core one of the three “hottest cleantech companies on the planet.”

Ener-Core has developed the 250kW Ener-Core power station EC250 and its larger counterpart, the 2MW Ener-Core power station KG2-3GEF/GO, to transform methane gas—especially “ultra-low-Btu gas” from landfills, petrochemical companies, oil fields and refineries, alcohol distilleries and other low-quality methane sources—into continuous clean electricity with near-zero emissions.

The opportunity for the industries that adopt Ener-Core’s technology is immense. Currently, more than 150 billion cubic meters of gas are flared—i.e., released into the atmosphere—annually (Ener-Core’s CEO notes that if this amount of gas were produced by a country, it would rank as the sixth-largest global gas producer). The monetary value of this waste gas, if it were converted to energy is around $65 billion/year. This represents enough annual power for 100 million homes every year!

A wide variety of companies can benefit from Ener-Core’s technology including those in the fields of coal-mining, landfills, oil, gas, food processing, plastics manufacturing, alcohol distilleries, wastewater treatment and more. Additionally, major gas turbine companies can integrate Ener-Core’s technology into their power station designs. This can enable these gas turbine companies to sell their turbines into the $75 billion waste gas markets that have historically been off-limits for gas turbines and engines. Ener-Core will benefit from the established global sales forces and brand equity of these companies; every time they sell a waste-gas power station, it will have an Ener-Core Power Oxidizer integrated with the partner’s turbine.

As the technology that Castro and his team at Ener-Core are now deploying becomes better known, companies stand to profit from the sale of the energy they reap from their former waste gases. On a larger scale, at the same time, humanity stands to profit—as the amount of these gases released into the atmosphere is reduced.