About five years ago Bullfrog Power of Toronto broke new ground by becoming the first retailer of 100 per cent green electricity. It purchases power from small wind and hydro developers and sells it back to its customers at a green premium. Customers don’t consume the clean power directly but instead purchase it like a direct offset to the electricity they take from the grid. Bullfrog takes a portion of the premium it charges and invests it in new green power to accommodate its customers’ growing needs.

Today, Bullfrog is announcing plans to take the same model to the business of selling natural gas, starting with a pilot project that will see it deliver a “green” natural gas product to Kraft Canada, which is purchasing enough of it — along with green electricity — to cover the baking and packaging of its Dad’s line of oatmeal cookies.  Kraft will print a “Bullfrog-powered” logo on the front of 15 million boxes annually to promote the low-carbon content of its cookies to customers.

There are two interesting angles here. One is that Kraft will be one of the first major food brands to promote the fact that the making of a particular product was carbon-neutral or better. This is presumably to boost the appeal to consumers who are concerned about climate change. And why not go in this direction? Food manufacturers and retailers already do well selling products that are “organic” or “free range” or have “zero transfats” or come from local farmers. The kind of energy used to make a product should also be part of the equation, and perhaps we’ll see this trend taking off — which is exactly what Bullfrog is hoping to kickstart.

The other angle is the impact this will have on the natural gas market. Bullfrog is getting its green gas product from a company in Quebec called EBI Energie, which has a landfill-gas facility nearly Montreal that injects into a nearby TransCanada Pipeline. The injection of biogas or landfill gas into natural gas pipelines is done throughout Europe and parts of the United States, but it’s a relatively new thing here in Canada. EBI is one of the few doing it, and that’s because considerable expense must go into extracting and conditioning the gas to the point of being pipeline quality before injection. For projects to be economical, they must be of a certain scale. Bullfrog, as a future reseller of this product, could be a catalyst for more biogas/landfill-gas injection projects emerging across the country, assuming its customers are willing to pay for it. It will also create more awareness of this opportunity, as it did for green electricity.

One barrier in Ontario will be the feed-in-tariff program, which pays a premium to developers who want to turn biogas/landfill gas into electricity. This incentive skews the market in favour of electricity production, which from a greenhouse-gas emissions perspective may not be the best approach. More on that later…

Making the news today is a town council in Worcestershire, U.K., that wants to heat a local leisure centre and swimming pool using heat from the neighbourhood crematorium.  This isn’t a new idea. Towns in Denmark and Sweden have been taking this approach for years, but the idea seems to be spreading. Humans are, after all, just another form of renewable power — and with the planet heading toward 9 billion, it makes sense to throw humanity into the biomass feedstock, particularly now that — in Canada, at least — more than half of the population choose the cremation route. Consider it our last contribution to the world we leave behind.

The council argues that it’s better to put the heat to good use rather than release it directly to the atmosphere. There are other approaches, of course, including turning corpses into a chemical soup through an environmentally friendly process called resomation — or biocremation. I wrote about a Toronto-based company called Transition Sciences back in 2009 that is trying to push the resomation concept, which uses one-tenth of the natural gas and one-third of the electricity used in conventional crematoria. Both approaches have merit — one inefficient but funneling some energy back to local system, the other dramatically reducing the amount of energy used (and emissions emitted) from the start.

Thoughts?

Enerkem being a Canadian company doesn’t seem to impact its ability to get financial support from the U.S. government. Montreal-based Enerkem, on top of an earlier $50 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, has just received another $80 million in loan guarantees, this time from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was one of only three biofuel companies to get this support — the others were Coskata and INEOS New Planet Bioenergy.

The loan guarantees will back Enerkem’s construction of its landmark waste-to-biofuels project in Pontotoc, Mississippi, which will transform Northeast Mississippi’s municipal solid waste into ethanol. “Enerkem’s biorefinery operation in Mississippi – a 300 ton-per-day facility located on the Three Rivers landfill site – will initially produce 10 million gallons/36 million litres of ethanol annually from sorted municipal solid waste and will reduce the pressure to landfill,” according to the company, which expects to create more than 70 permanent jobs.

It would be nice if our federal government offered more loan guarantees of this sort…

It would be nice to see more of these combined heat and power projects announced across Ontario, particularly those that take advantage of local wood waste. The Ontario Power Authority just announced that it has struck a 10-year power purchase agreement with St. Marys Paper Corp., a large paper mill in Sault Ste. Marie, which is in northern Ontario. The mill plans to build (and co-locate) a new power plant that will use bark and wood waste to generate 30 megawatts of electricity. Waste heat from the plant will be used by the paper mill for industrial processes. Construction is expected to begin next year, and it’s anticipated that 555 direct and indirect jobs will be created as the plant works toward commercial operation in 2014.

This project achieves many things. Jobs, for one, as well as green and efficiently used energy. It also makes St. Marys Paper more competitive, so in a way it provides some added job security for existing employees at the plant. One concern, however, is the fact that St. Marys has negotiated access to up to 400,000 tonnes of biomass annually from the area’s Crown forests for the life of the project. What this means, exactly, I don’t know. Does it mean St. Marys can harvest the forest slash or directly cut down trees for fuel? I would hope that whatever is harvested from these forests will go toward producing paper products first, and then whatever is left over can be used for energy production.

It would also be nice if the power authority disclosed exactly how much it’s paying for this electricity or any other incentives it may be offering. There’s a hint in this report that tens of millions of dollars may flow to the company from the province’s forestry sector prosperity funds, and this would be on top of the $17 million or so in financial aid that went to the struggling company after it was rescued from a bankrupty sale in 2007. The hope, one assumes, is that the CHP plant will lower energy costs for St. Marys and help it to eventually wean itself from corporate welfare.

I reported earlier on plans by the City of Toronto to begin converting its organic bin waste into biogas that can be upgraded to natural gas and injected into the region’s natural gas pipeline. Currently, the methane resulting from the city’s main biodigester facility is flared, but plans are finally underway to capture methane at the existing facility and a new facility to be built. There are two options for how the city will use the gas. It could sell it into Enbridge’s natural gas pipeline as a way to offset the natural gas it currently uses to heat government buildings, or it could use it to fuel a new fleet of waste collection vehicles that run on compressed natural gas. Hinting at the latter, the city purchased and recently received its first waste-collection vehicle that runs on CNG. Read the city’s news release here.

It would be a great achivement if Toronto could one day claim to be running all its garbage trucks on, well, garbage. I know it’s not politically correct to call it garbage, but you know what I mean. Better to offset the use of diesel fuel than to flare a perfectly useful source of energy.