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.

Ottawa-based Plasco Energy Group says its energy-from-waste technology is now proven and it’s time to move to commercial delivery. To help in that effort, it announced today a $110 million private equity placement led largely by Ares Management LLC of Los Angeles. Since 2005 Plasco had already managed to raise $135 million in equity, so this latest haul bring the total to $245 million — not bad in today’s markets. Another $25 million in government grants rounds out the total to $270 million.

Plasco chairman and CEO Rod Bryden called the latest investment in the company “a remarkable expression of confidence.” The company is targeting its efforts at North America, Europe and China. It has two pilot facilities already — a 100-tonne-per-day plant in Ottawa and a much smaller plant in Spain — but a 300 tonne-per-day facility is in the works in Red Deer, Alberta, and is expected to be completed in 2012. One can only assume that the Ottawa facility has worked out its kinks, otherwise I can’t see any responsible investor throwing down $100 million to pursue commercial projects.

This is good news for Plasco and another shot of confidence in the emerging market for new energy-from-waste technologies. Montreal-based Enerkem is another Canadian company riding this wave with its ethanol-from-waste systems, having recently raised nearly $54 million from Waste Management and a number of venture capital firms. Don Roberts, vice-chair of CIBC World Market’s clean technology and green energy team, recently told me that energy-from-waste was one of three main areas to watch over the coming years, along with energy efficiency and water. He may be right.

When I wrote earlier about Pond Biofuels and its work with St. Marys Cement, I mentioned that Lafarge’s plan to burn biomass fuel in its cement kiln in Bath, Ontario, was on hold because of the financial difficulties of its Kingston-based partner, Performance Plants, which had bioengineered a variety of drought-resistant grass/tree species to grow on marginal farmlands. According to Lafarge, however, the project is continuing on course despite the troubles at Performance Plants. Here’s how Robert Cumming, manager of environmental affairs at Lafarge Canada, explained the situation in a recent e-mail: (more…)

Kudos to Vincent Chornet. The president, CEO and co-founder of Montreal-based Enerkem (along with his father, Esteban) has in just a few years turned his company into a leading player in the emerging waste-to-fuel market. Today, Enerkem gained even more momentum, announcing it had secured $53.8 million in venture financing in a round that included Houston-based Waste Management, the continent’s top waste-management firm.

Enerkem uses a thermochemical fluidized-bed process to gasify municipal solid waste (organics, wood waste, plastics), demolition wood, and agricultural/forest residues. The resulting syngas is cleaned and, using a proven catalyst, can be turned into a variety of end products, including methanol, ethanol and high-value olefins (plastics). The company is in the process of building a waste-to-ethanol facility in Mississippi (75 million litres a year) and an Edmonton plant (36 million litres a year) that will also turn sorted municipal solid waste into ethanol. The Edmonton facility is being done in partnership with Greenfield Ethanol, Canada’s largest independent ethanol producer. Meanwhile, in Westbury, Quebec, the company has a commercial-scale demonstration facility that currently turns old wooden hydro poles into ethanol.

Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and BDR Capital, all existing investors, participated in the financing round with Waste Management, along with new investor Cycle Capital. “This financing round validates Enerkem’s business and advances our path towards leadership in the waste and advanced fuels markets,” said Chornet in a release. In an earlier story (July 2008) I wrote for Greentech Media, Chornet said that burning waste or burning the syngas created from waste is, well, a waste. Based on electricity and ethanol prices at the time, a company can make three times more revenue per tonne of processed waste compared to a plant that simply burns its syngas to generate electricity, he said. Chornet also said Enerkem’s process is profitable with oil at $50 a barrel and if the company can get a competitive tipping fee to take the garage.

There was a big stink this week when a published study, led by University of Virginia civil engineering professor Andres Clarens, concluded that producing biofuels from algae isn’t as climate-friendly as many people believe, at least when compared to getting biofuels from switchgrass, canola, and – Huh? — even corn. The results, according to an abstract of the study, “indicate that these conventional crops have a lower environmental impact than algae in energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water regardless of cultivation location.” Why? Because of the need to supply more nutrients — i.e. fertilizer — to algae to stimulate growth, and fertilizer is energy-intensive to produce.

The problem with this conclusion? Clarens based the life-cycle analysis on data that was mostly 10 years old. For example, some current algae cultivation practices, particularly those based on wastewater or sea water, tackle the fertilizer issue head on. So the age of the data is an important bit of information that should have been made very clear in the study — even the abstract. Ten years in the world of technology, particular cleantech, is a long time. I mean, the big R&D push around algae-based fuels only began three or four years ago, and 10 years ago the “cleantech” sector didn’t exist in name. Ten years ago the world was still wrapping its head around Y2K, George W. Bush was just getting into office, Google was still a start-up years from going public, and the TV show CSI (the original one) had its world premiere. In other words, you can expect data about algae cultivation to be, well, rather useless as a reflection of current practices.

This isn’t to blame Clarens. As he told the New York Times’ Green Inc., the most current data out there is simply unavailable to academia. It’s proprietary. (more…)