A farm in Abbotsford, B.C., is converting brown gold into green energy.
Chris Bush, founder of Catalyst Power Inc., said his $5.5 million biogas upgrading plant that converts manure and other waste into natural gas for home heating is in the testing and commissioning phase.
If everything goes well, the facility will be producing for British Columbia’s natural gas grid sometime this month.
Bush said the Abbotsford plant is the first of its kind in Canada but it won’t be the last.
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“It is our intention to build a lot of these across Canada. My goal is to build 125 copies of this across the country,” he said.
That is his 10-year plan.
The short-term objective is to build 10 plants over the next two years anywhere there is a concentration of livestock farms.
Bush came up with the idea about five years ago after reading aPopular Sciencearticle about the Central Vermont Public Service’s Cow Power project, a utility that was using anaerobic digesters to turn cow manure into electricity.
He discovered there were no digesters operating in B.C. and only a few in Canada but lots in other parts of the world.
Bush wanted to do something different with his project. An economic analysis told him he needed to build plants that were much larger than their European counterparts, which are heavily subsidized.
The Abbotsford plant will eventually be capable of producing the equivalent of three megawatts of energy versus a typical 300 kilowatt German biogas upgrading facility.
The other significant departure is that instead of burning the gas to create electricity, his plants will deliver it directly into the natural gas distribution network. The Abbotsford facility will be the 126th of the more than 10,000 biogas upgraders around the world to do so.
Bush got the technology he was looking for from a New Zealand company. Flotech produces a water scrubbing and purification system that converts unrefined biogas into natural gas clean enough for use in homes.
The Flotech system converts 98 percent of the energy in the biogas into methane compared to a 35 to 40 percent conversion rate for a typical biogas-to-electricity plant.
“Our Greenlane Biogas system is an ideal add-on to farm anaerobic digestion systems because it’s a water-based system that uses no toxic chemicals and it’s a real workhorse that has been a proven performer for more than 20 years in installations around the globe,” said Sean Mezei, president of Flotech North America.
The Abbotsford plant will use a variety of feedstocks. It has three 30-metre diameter by nine metre high reception tanks – one for cattle and poultry manure, another for fats, oils and greases and one for dissolved air flotation cake, a byproduct of chicken processing plants.
“To feed my plant, ultimately I need the manure from 2,000 cows and from about 1.5 million chickens plus off-farm materials,” said Bush.
The manure will come from two poultry and three dairy farms within a five kilometre radius of the plant. The five farms are investors in the Abbotsford facility along with other raw material suppliers from off the farm.
Bush said dairy farms are a better supplier of manure than feedlots because you know exactly what you’re going to be getting every day and having a predictable supply is critical.
Mezei said there have been some serious water quality issues in the Abbotsford area, which is intensely farmed.
“The ministry of environment wasn’t very happy with the water quality,” he said.
Some livestock producers involved in the project told him if they hadn’t found a sustainable way to handle their manure production, they would have been forced out of farming within a couple of years.
The digester produces biogas, fertilizer that goes back to the farmers and a bedding material for their cows.
The Flotech equipment compresses and purifies the biogas. Terasen Gas, a B.C. utility, delivers the resulting quality biomethane directly into a pipeline that services its customers around the province.
During phase one of the operation, the Abbotsford plant will produce enough natural gas annually to heat 1,000 homes. The plan is to eventually double the output by adding another digester.
Mezei said the goal is to build another two to four plants across Canada in 2011, with B.C., Ontario and Quebec being the most likely markets. Flotech is also exploring joint ventures in the United States.
He said the technology will never replace conventional natural gas as an energy source in North America but it will provide a niche market for a greener alternative.
“If we’re doing really well here in the next five years, we’ll replace two or three percent of the gas in the grid,” he said.
