SDTC dishes out another $54 million toward demonstration of Canadian cleantech
It’s that time again. Sustainable Development Technology Canada has awarded grants to another round of companies eager to demonstrate their respective clean technologies. This time around 18 projects are being funded to the tune of $54 million. To date SDTC has invested $425 million in 171 clean technology projects. Of the 18, here are a few that caught my attention:
* Duropar Technologies Inc. of Brampton, Ontario, has partnered with Canadian Pacific Railway on a project that seeks to replace the use of creosote-covered railway ties with ones that are made of 100 per cent waste-based composite material. By waste, I mean plastic that is difficult to recycle through municipal programs and old asphalt, which is a pain in the butt to dispose of. Now, no secret that the old creosote ties have toxic chemicals in them that leech into the soil and ground-water along train tracks. Here’s a fact I didn’t know: the railway industry goes through more than 20 million ties a year in North America alone. “Each tie leaches up to 15 kilograms of creosote over its lifetime,” according to SDTC. Duropar has no apparent Web site, but I did find this link to one of their patents. Its composite ties don’t leech, so are considered a much “greener” alternative.
* Saltworks Technologies Inc. of Vancouver, B.C., has developed a desalination system “that reduces electrical energy requirements by up to 80 per cent, thereby improving the affordability and accessibility of clean water,” according to SDTC. The key to this is an inexpensive, low-temperature thermal energy conversion system that uses solar energy or industrial waste heat (process heat) to reduce electricity consumption. For the SDTC project, Saltworks will build a commercial-scale 5,000-litre/day “transportable” pilot plant that can be used for ocean water. The process doesn’t rely on chemicals. The company, as you can see by its Web site, is still pretty much in stealth mode. If its process and technology are as efficient as promised, this could be huge for the Middle East, Australia, and shoreline areas of the U.S. southwest that have scarce fresh-water resources. The Middle East alone, certainly an area with terrific solar exposure, wants to build several massive oil-fired generating stations that will be used to power desalination plants. The potential market is massive.
* And then there’s StormFisher Biogas of Toronto, a company I’ve written about several times before. Seems StormFisher is moving ahead with plans to produce biogas in anaerobic digesters that can be injected into Ontario’s natural gas pipeline — specifically, the pipeline owned and operated by Union Gas. It will be a Canadian-first if they can do it, though “Canadian first” means little when we know it’s being done all the time in Europe. Still, nice to see us getting into the game. StormFisher’s system will take methane produced from manure and food processing by-products (i.e grape skins from wine-making, waste from cheese and milk production, etc.) and will convert it into pipeline-grade natural gas. At the same time, StormFisher’s own process by-product — i.e. the digestate — will be turned into a quality organic fertilizer that can be sold back to farmers to displace the use of chemical fertilizers. “The project aims to validate next generation biogas technologies which, although commercially available in Europe, are not in use in North America,” according to SDTC.
Tags: Duropar, Saltworks, SDTC, StormFisher Biogas
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business 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 clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
September 11th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Excellent synopsis – it is a good reminder that green technologies are not just about renewable energies- extremely interesting about the railroad ties. But I was especially interested in the desalination system by Saltworks- perhaps being in a two-year drought here in Central Texas is part of it;-) But after energy, I think parts of the world are going to have some large issues with water in the not-too-distant future, and desalination may be a big part of the solution. Oddly, when I saw that Ausra, the developer of Thermal Solar Power using its fresnel lenses was also adapting its technology to produce Industrial steam, I wondered at the time if it could be used as a means for lower cost desalination.