Renewables
Waste not, want not
- Details
- Category: Alberta Renewables
- Written by Diane L.M. Cook
Not only are many Albertans calling on industry and government to rely less on fossil fuels for energy and more on renewable energy sources, but they’re also demanding that our waste be managed more efficiently.
A case in point is the Southern Alberta Energy-from-Waste Alliance (SAEWA), a coalition of waste management jurisdictions representing about 60 communities made up of 225,000 residents that is in the incubation stage of building a waste-to-energy facility (WTEF).
In building the WTEF, SAEWA says it will add a fourth R—“recover”—to the standard three Rs of reduce, reuse and recycle. “The fourth R is as important as the other three Rs, and it’s SAEWA’s goal that the fourth R becomes the standard,” says Kim Craig, SAEWA chairman.
The alliance has retained the consulting services of HDR and AECOM Canada to conduct a four-phase study to prove the merits of a WTEF. Phase one was comprised of two tasks: determining waste generation rates and facility sizing; and researching potential combustion technologies. Both tasks are now complete.
“The data collected in task one indicates that there are large quantities of feedstock with adequate heating value, which are suitable for and available to a future waste-to-energy facility in southern Alberta. In task two, there was a number of technologies identified that would be capable of processing the waste identified in task one,” says Craig.
SAEWA is now moving forward with phase two, which will look at material handling and transportation. “In this phase, we will identify waste collection, transportation and handling implications with associated siting opportunities, as well as heat recovery and cogeneration options including potential market/siting opportunities, environmental implications, and the facility permitting and siting requirements,” Craig explains.
Canada lags
Waste-to-energy is an environmentally safe and proven technology for providing electricity that has been used successfully in Canada, the United States and Europe for decades. However, Craig says Europe is much more advanced than Canada is in the waste-to-energy industry.
“A major reason for this is the high numbers of population that European countries have,” he says. “For example, in Germany, there are about 81.7 million citizens and the country is roughly half the size of Alberta. In Canada, there are about 34.5-million citizens and the country is [many] times the size of Germany. Germany is now banning landfills and that decision would most likely be based on that country’s lack of available land for landfills and its high numbers of population.”
The biggest benefit of a WTEF is that it can divert significant amounts of waste currently being landfilled. As Craig points out, landfills are becoming more difficult to get approval for and more expensive to operate, in addition to facing more stringent regulations.
“People also want landfills to be closed because of the amount of methane and greenhouse gas emissions that they emit. We need to find alternatives to landfilling our waste and WTEFs are definitely one viable option,” he says.
In Alberta, Edmonton will be the first to have a WTEF in this province, with a commercial waste-to-biofuels facility scheduled to open in 2012.
At a capital cost of $80 million, the biofuels facility will produce and sell next-generation biofuels, including methanol and cellulosic ethanol, from municipal solid waste. The feedstock for conversion to biofuels will come from Edmonton’s composting, recycling and processing facilities—waste that would otherwise be landfilled. It is anticipated that 100,000 tonnes of feedstock will be processed per year, allowing the city to divert up to 90 per cent of waste from its landfills—a considerable improvement over the 60 per cent currently diverted through recycling and composting.
Countering the critics
Converting waste into energy and diverting garbage from landfills while earning revenue in the process sounds almost too good to be true. Detractors of WTEF say the emissions from the facilities such as dioxins and furans, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, bottom and fly ash, mercury and other metals are harmful to humans and the environment.
But Glenn Bohn, a communications specialist with Metro Vancouver, which operates a WTEF in south Burnaby, isn’t buying the criticism. “Typically, critics have used information from old, highly polluting incinerators that are no longer allowed in Canada so that information is no longer relevant to today’s modern WTEFs.”
His company’s WTEF is a modern facility equipped with proper pollution control systems such as activated charcoal beds, spray dry scrubbing, and carbon and ammonia injection systems.
“Metro Vancouver’s pollution control systems greatly reduce the levels of emissions thereby resulting in very low amounts or no emissions being emitted from the facility, which means the facility poses little to no health or environmental risks,” Bohn says.
Craig says the next step in SAEWA’s plan is completing the four-phase study. The third phase will explore facility capital and operating costs and should be completed by the end of 2011. The final phase will include a technology review, tests, visits to other WTEF sites and stakeholder meetings.
Once the entire study is complete, Craig says SAEWA will review all of the factors to determine if a WTEF would be a viable solution for southern Alberta’s waste. “First we have to make sure that the economic, financial and socio-economic factors are there. If they are, then we will move forward with the project. If they aren’t, we will have to work to ensure those factors are present in order to bring WTE to southern Alberta.”
