In Canada, a waste-to-energy first
By the end of next year, the Canadian city of Edmonton could be home to an energy plant like no other: the world’s first industrial-scale municipal facility to take solid waste and convert it into liquid biofuels.
The $75 million (US) plant, being built by Canada-based Enerkem (pdf), is expected to produce around 36 million litres (10 million gallons) of biofuels a year from municipal waste. That’s enough for a year’s worth of driving by 400,000 cars using a five per cent ethanol blend, according to the company. The plant’s construction is being paid for in part with government funding from the city of Edmonton and the province of Alberta.
Enerkem is building a similar plant in Mississippi with the help of $50 in funding from the US Department of Energy.
The 100,000 tonnes of solid waste that will fuel the Canadian plant will be garbage that the city cannot recycle or compost. In addition to generating biofuels, the facility will also reduce methane emissions from landfills, where organic waste decomposition produces large amounts of the powerful greenhouse gas.
Over the next 25 years, the Edmonton plant is expected to reduce Alberta’s carbon footprint by about six million tonnes.
“As a result of this facility, we will become the first major city in North America to see 90 per cent of residential waste diverted from landfill by 2013,” Stephen Mandel, Edmonton’s mayor, said at the plant’s groundbreaking ceremony today. “This is a major achievement, and a big step towards a greener Edmonton.”
“This groundbreaking marks the launch of a transformative project and leads the first wave of commercial-scale advanced biofuels plants in North America,” added Vincent Chornet, president and CEO of Enerkem. “This plant is the genesis of a world transformation where our non-recyclable garbage will power the vehicles we drive and reduce carbon emissions.”
While Enerkem uses a gasification process to convert solid waste into fuel, even burning solid waste for energy is a better bet for the environment. Every tonne of organic waste that goes to landfill produces about 62 cubic metres of methane as it degrades. That amount of gas has more than two times the greenhouse gas potential than the one tonne of carbon dioxide that would be produced by burning.
