Manitoba farmers produce about four million litres of waste oil per year while Saskatchewan farmers produce more than eight million litres. In rural Alberta nearly 40 million litres are collected annually.
Now that driveway dumping is prohibited, that’s a lot of oil that needs to go somewhere.
“Here in Manitoba, farms account for approximately 25 percent of the total volume of waste oil,” said Ron Benson of the Manitoba Association for Resource Recovery, an industry funded agency established a decade ago to deal with waste oil.
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“The oil is picked up by registered collectors and taken to licensed processors. In the summer, much of it goes to the States as a heat source for asphalt plants.”
Benson said the waste oil business is a free market, with collectors selling to the highest bidder. It might go to the Tolko forest industries plant in northern Manitoba or it might go to an asphalt plant in southern Minnesota.
“Some of it even gets trucked from Manitoba all the way to Vancouver where there’s a re-refining plant. They process waste oil and turn it into new engine oil again,” Benson said.
While the market is wide open, handling is not. Regulations governing the handling of oil are strict. All movement of waste oil is strictly documented on a manifest system.
Because waste oil is a commodity with commercial value, registered collectors are careful that none of the waste oil gets, well, wasted.
In some situations, collection companies pay for the oil, so they’re careful with handling. Large oil batches located closer to a processing plant are worth more than smaller batches farther away that can cost more to collect than they’re worth.
For example, registered oil collectors in Saskatchewan pay from eight cents to 14 cents per litre of waste oil.
Collectors also pick up oil filters to be processed into steel. Many of them collect plastic oil containers for recycling.
“Manitoba has 70 licensed waste oil drop site depots; 60 of these are in rural Manitoba,” Benson said.
The Saskatchewan Association for Resource Recovery has 300 drop sites, almost as many as the Alberta Used Oil Management Association, which has 343 sites.
Some registered oil collection companies refine their waste oil before selling it in Canada. Others simply sell raw waste oil directly into the American market without processing.
EnviroWest is the largest waste oil company in Western Canada. Manitoba operations manager Norm Klippenstein said the company has different activities in each province.
“We have a refinery in Winnipeg that removes the heavy metals from waste oil,” Klippenstein said.
He explained that refined waste oil is a much cleaner burning fuel than straight waste oil because the heavy metals are removed. Heavy metals from the Winnipeg EnviroWest refinery are transported to the Hazco Environmental landfill site near Virden, Man.
All registered collection companies are required to remove the heavy metals before waste oil can be sold as fuel in Canada. Most of that waste oil is used to generate heat for asphalt plants.
“If you can burn waste oil at an asphalt plant, then you reduce the use of virgin fuel products from the ground, such as diesel or propane. That reduces our dependence on nonrenewable fossil fuels.
“It helps subsidize a lot of the cost to our province for paving roads in Manitoba. Probably 60 to 70 percent of the waste oil we collect in Manitoba goes through the refinery and is used to fuel our asphalt plants.”
Klippenstein said the other 30 percent is shipped raw to the United States where looser environmental regulations in some areas allow asphalt plants to burn waste oil that still contains heavy metals.
“Many of the registered collectors simply pick up the waste oil and then ship it all straight to the States. So there’s no benefit to Manitoba, other than removal of the oil.
“If the waste oil is used in the province where it’s collected, then there’s economic benefits – jobs and locally produced energy.”
Although EnviroWest in Alberta sells a limited volume of refined waste oil to American customers, most of the oil collected in Alberta stays in the province. It’s a fact that EnviroWest general manager John Powell is proud of.
“We ship refined burner fuel by rail to regular customers as far as Wisconsin and Georgia. But 90 percent of the waste oil we collect goes to customers right here in Alberta,” said Powell.
He estimates that only five to 10 percent of all Alberta waste oil leaves the province.
“We have a strong industrial base here and a lot of uses for burner fuel.”
Powell said EnviroWest in Alberta refines everything according to the same minimum heavy metal standards that apply to all provinces.
“Beyond that, we can refine to meet much higher standards. Whatever criteria the customer sets, we can meet it. We have one American contract for burner fuel with standards that are even stricter than our own.”
Some waste oil travels over the mountains to the Newalta re-refinery in Vancouver. This plant processes 36 million litres of waste oil every year, with 60 percent of that volume converted to a high quality base oil that can once again become motor oil.
The remaining 40 percent goes to the market as industrial burner grade fuel. Newalta also operates a waste oil refinery at Regina.
For more information, contact www.usedoilrecycling.com or www.envirowestinc.com.
