Plasco to build energy-from-waste facility in Alberta
Plasco Energy Group has signed its first commercial North American contract for an energy-from-waste facility, building on the pilot plant that’s currently in operation in Ottawa, Ontario. The company announced that it has signed a deal with Red Deer, Alberta, to build a facility that will process 300 tons-per-day of waste and generate 15 megawatts of “green” electricity for the local grid. The company’s technology is based on gasification and a number of processes that create high-quality syngas, which is then burned in Jenbacher engines to generate electricity.
The Red Deer facility is conditional on the performance of the Ottawa demonstration plant, which must meet certain energy efficiencies and a variety of strict environmental requirements. Same goes for the larger Ottawa plant. There has been some concern expressed, on this blog and others, that Plasco’s pilot plant still isn’t functioning as promises — i.e. that it’s operating under capacity, and has been in and out of service as the company fine-tunes its processes and adjusts equipment. It also hasn’t generated much electricity, which makes sense because the government program that pays 11 cents per kilowatt-hour hasn’t yet started.
But the company seems to be confident enough with the performance of its Ottawa pilot plant to suggest it will start construction of the Red Deer plant “early in 2009.” Meanwhile, it appears the company has good access to money. You’ll recall last December it announced it had secured access to $200 million in funding to carry through with its plant buildouts. Plasco, in most cases, plans to own, build and manage the plants, earning revenues from tipping fees, electricity sales (where possible), and the sale of other byproducts from its process.
As you’ll see from the picture above, Plasco has also proposed to build one of its plants in Los Angeles, and CEO Rod Bryden has told me the company is in serious discussions with several other municipalities.
Alberta, it should be said, is becoming quite the leader in energy-from-waste adoption. In June the City of Edmonton, the province’s capital, announced that it would turn residual municipal solid waste into ethanol as part of a partnership with Montreal-based gasification expert Enerkem and Toronto-based Greenfield Ethanol, the largest independent ethanol producer in Canada.
Tags: clean electricity, energy-from-waste, ethanol, gasification, municipal solid waste
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
September 6th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I agree with waste gasification but we must be cautious to not sacrifice our recycling system for this. Actualy gasification WILL BE (for sure) more economical than recycling, but we must not end up cutting more trees to while feeding electricity plants with papers….
September 7th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Another potential part of the planetary puzzle. It’s nice to see the development of, and reporting of, the many aspects of of how we can change the way we interact with our environment, and do so in a way that makes economic sense. Gasification of waste may not be as sexy as PV’s, Wind turbines and electric cars, but dealing with our waste, and finding solutions for it, is just as important;-) Now, about our food and water supply…
November 20th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Hello Tyler, I wish you would stop reporting that Plasco is receiving .11 cents per kwh. They are not. they do not have a contract with the OPA. Their electricity is being sold to the grid at the going wholesale price. I told you this a year ago and you are still incorrectly reporting Plasco’s business model. If they had a contract with the OPA it would have to be public knowledge listed on the OPA website – happy hunting.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:34 am
Hi Tyler
Sorry to desagree with what you wrote :
” Plasco already has a small demonstration plant at an Ottawa-area landfill site that processes up to 85 tons of municipal solid waste daily.”
The reality is that after more than one year of experimentation, Plasco is only processing , in average, less than 10% of the targeted capacity, you can check that on page 5 of the monthly report you can find at :
http://www.zerowasteottawa.com/docs/Plasco%20Monthly%20Engs%20Rpt%20(4Dec08)%20DCS.pdf
It is clearly stated in this report that the average daily quantity of municipal waste processed is 8.2 tons..( to be compared with 85 tons..)
Furthermore there is no significant electricity production yet. whereas they expected MégaWatts..
My understanding is that “Plasco” is making good add on a process which a not yet running as expected….
Dany ( Paris – France )
May 5th, 2009 at 10:31 am
There seems to be a lot of buzz about Plasco and its technology for waste conversion. It looks as if the company is making great strides towards a solution for our huge garbage problem. I think its great that there are companies out there taking intiative to create green technologies such as this.
I took a look at the company website and came across this neat video that outlines the whole Plasco process. It’s worth a look.
Here is the link:
Here is the link: http://www.plascoenergygroup.com/?Media_Centre#Animated-Video
November 19th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Plasco demoplant at Ottawa produced electricity less than 1 hour during October 2009 processing less tnan 8 tons of waste / day .See page 2 and 6 of the following report available at :
http://www.zerowasteottawa.com/docs/Plasco%20Monthly%20Engineers%20Report%20FNL-6Nov09TA.PDF
Very, very far from initial expectations !!
Dany
Paris – France