Plasco Energy Group Inc., the plasma gasification company run by former Ottawa Senators hockey club owner Rod Bryden, has started construction of a small energy-from-waste demonstration facility in Canada’s capital. The facility will process enough municipal solid waste (about 84 tonnes a day) to power itself and still feed back 4 megawatts into the Ontario grid. All eyes will be on this demonstration to see whether plasma gasification technology – as opposed to incineration — can cost-effectively turn post-recycled municipal solid waste into electricity while keeping below strict environmental and emissions standards. A successful trial here could finally convince politicians in Toronto to give the technology a chance, as opposed to seeking out temporary landfills to handle garbage that’s currently being trucked to Michigan.

It would be nice to see some kind of comparison between the emissions per tonne of garbage processed by Plasco and tailpipe emissions for every tonne of garbage trucked to Michigan. Factor in the fact that the electricity produced from Plasco’s process means an equivalent amount of electricity not being produced by coal, and it may be that gasification is the cleaner route. Cost then becomes the biggest issue.

On a similar note, a Toronto-area company called Zero Waste Energy Systems Inc. (soon to be acquired by Plasma Environmental Technologies Inc.) announced today that it has partnered with Siemens Canada to jointly develop “small-scale distributed power plants in southern Ontario to run on organic waste fuels.”

Siemens will be in charge of the energy-from-waste infrastructure, project design, project financing and negotiation of electricity sale contracts, and Zero Waste will be responsible for supplying and transporting engineered fuels from biomass feedstock and coming up with optimal fuel blends. “The first plant will be constructed in southwestern Ontario,” the companies said. “It is expected to supply electricity to the grid under Ontario’s recently announced Standard Purchase Offer at 11 cents per kilowatt hour, and thermal power to local agricultural greenhouses at prices significantly below those of fossil fuels.”

I’ll try to get more details on this particular project later, but the idea of small-scale distributed power plants that also combat local waste problems is an intriguing idea and could get around some of the NIMBY issues that larger plants face. I know the jury is still out on whether these technologies work as promised, and while high cost is also an issue, I do think we need to give the plasma gasification approach a chance to prove itself or fail. 

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