St. Albert might be in for some disappointment if it hopes to make money off a small-scale waste-to-energy system, say analysts.
St. Albert city council voted this week to open talks with regional partners on a waste-to-energy pilot project, with an aim to have the pilot launched this June. The city is exploring waste-to-energy in hopes it will reduce waste sent to landfill and make it money.
The pilot will test small-scale waste-to-energy systems that use gasification (which is where you cook waste in low oxygen to produce gas which can be burned to produce heat and electricity) to see how much they cost to run and if they work with St. Albert’s waste mix, said city utilities and environment director Kate Polkovsky.
“We don’t know a ton of what it can do for us,” she said of the technology, and we’ve yet to determine what system will be used, what it would cost or what profit it would produce.
This one-year pilot, which could be funded by grants, should limit the city’s risk in this initial test period, Polkovsky said.
A white paper on waste-to-energy provided to city council found a gasification/pyrolysis-based system would cost $57 to $806 per tonne of waste, depending on the technology used, and would not be viable unless linked in to some sort of off-grid community development. Polkovsky said the city had yet to determine what that development would look like, as it would depend on the amount of energy the system produced.
Polkovsky noted St. Albert would continue to recycle and compost if it pursued waste-to-energy, as it was already doing a really good job at both. Waste-to-energy would look to turn the last 36 per cent of waste that currently goes to the landfill (the brown cart material, which amounted to about 8,136 tonnes a year based on the latest population and waste diversion figures) into a commodity the city could sell.
Analysts cautious
Nickolas Themelis is a senior scientist at Columbia University’s Earth and Environmental Engineering Center and founder of the Global Waste to Energy Research and Technology Council, and has studied waste-to-energy systems worldwide for decades.
“Nobody makes money from garbage,” he said.
“The cheapest (method) is to dump it someplace, but that is not environmentally acceptable anymore.”
North America’s cheap landfill rates make landfill much cheaper than any other waste management option, said Christina Seidel of the Recycling Council of Alberta.
“From an economic point of view, if you have landfill, that’s going to win every time.”
Seidel said waste diversion through recycling and composting was much better for the environment than landfill or waste-to-energy, which is why it’s best to max diversion out (i.e. get diversion to about 80 per cent; St. Albert is at 64 per cent) first. Waste-to-energy has a slight edge environment-wise over landfill when used for unrecyclable, non-compostable waste.
Themelis said St. Albert would not see much electricity produced from waste-to-energy if it just used its own 8,136 tonnes of waste. His research suggests waste-to-energy systems become viable when you put at least 100,000 tons a year through them – 30 per cent more than what Roseridge Landfill gets in a year. European cities use systems that run on as little as 11,000 tons a year, but they also have much higher landfill fees (or no landfills) and energy prices than North America.
“The simpler thing to do would be to transport that small amount to Edmonton,” he said, and have the Enerkem waste-to-energy plant take care of it.
Waste-to-energy does become more viable if you hook it into a district heating system, as often happens in Denmark, Themelis added.
Case studies
Alberta has a handful of municipal-scale waste-to-energy systems that are in or near operation, none of which precisely match what’s under consideration for St. Albert.
The closest match scale-wise might be the refuse-derived fuel system proposed for the Town of Sylvan Lake. The town signed a deal with FogDog Energy this January after several years of research that would turn its 5,800-odd-tonnes of waste – recycling and compost included – into a flammable fluff that can be burned for energy, said town spokesperson Joanne Gaudet. (Seidel said this was a “very bad plan” from an environmental perspective, as it burned recyclable and compostable material.)
FogDog is providing the system (which is not a gasifier) at no up-front cost and is leasing land from the town for it, Gaudet said. If the system is approved by the province and works, the town will pay FogDog $100 a tonne to process its waste, which they believe will be offset by waste and recycling transportation savings ($200,000 a year) and lease revenue ($4,500/month/acre). FogDog, not the town, will take any profits from energy sales. The town hoped to have the system operational in two years.
Edmonton’s $200 million Enerkem plant converts up to 100,000 tonnes of Edmonton waste into 40 million litres of ethanol a year, which company spokesperson Pierre Boisseau told the Gazette reduces greenhouse gases by about 60 per cent by displacing fossil fuels. This plant uses a much different technology than the ones St. Albert is considering, and its profits go to Enerkem, not Edmonton.
The Southern Alberta Energy from Waste Association hopes to build a 300,000 tonne a year mass-burn (incineration) waste-to-energy plant by 2024 that would provide steam and electricity to nearby businesses such as a recycling plant, said vice-chair Paul Ryan. The group, a coalition of some 26 municipalities, reached that decision after many years and some $1.5 million in research.
Ryan said this $450 million plant would take all sorts of waste, including diseased animal carcasses, but would not replace the region’s current compost and recycling programs. An analysis by HDR Inc. reviewed by the Pembina Institute suggests the plant would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about seven megatonnes over its life relative to landfill by displacing fossil-fuel-fired electricity and recovering metals.
Ryan said the association considered a small-scale system like gasification, but rejected it, as they could not find a commercially viable example of it.
“The smaller the process facility is, the more expensive it is to run, generally,” he said.
Ryan advised St. Albert to “do their homework” before it went for waste-to-energy and to confirm there were real environmental benefits in doing so.
“It is an expensive thing to do,” he said – their plant will cost up to $92 a tonne to run – and if you roll the dice on anything but a proven technology, “you need to know you’re experimenting with taxpayer money.”
