The plan is for Enerkem to accept about 189,000 tons of unsorted waste per year from the nearby Three Rivers Solid Waste Management Authority of Mississippi. The two organizations are in the process of negotiating final financial and binding agreements. Enerkem figures that about 60 per cent of the incoming waste can be gasified at its ethanol plant to produce about 20 million gallons (about 75 million litres) of cellulosic biofuel annually. That would include crop and forest residues, urban “organic” waste, construction and demolition debris, including treated wood. The non-biomass portions that can’t be converted will be sorted and sent off for recycling.

This is a perfect example of green job creation. The company expects the project will create 300 jobs during the construction and start-up phases and 150 long-term jobs (direct and indirect) after that. Vincent Chornet, president and CEO of Enerkem, pointed out that the process is unique because, unlike other energy-from-waste facilities based on gasification, this one will use a mix of municipal solid waste and wood waste as feedstock that represent a negative cost — i.e. Enerkem will get a tipping fee rather than have to pay for feedstock, like first-generation ethanol plants and even those based just on wood waste. This approach, said Chornet, will lead to “substantial commercial scale and favorable economics.”

Those who have been following this company on Clean Break will remember the deal it signed last June to build a similar ethanol-from-waste facility in Edmonton, Alberta, as part of a joint venture with ethanol producer Greenfield Ethanol. Construction will start soon on the plant, which is supposed to be in operation by the end of 2010 and will be about half the size of the Mississippi plant. It also won’t require a separate sorting and recycling facility but instead will leverage Edmonton’s existing — and I should say, world class — solid waste recycling infrastructure.

Earlier this year, Enerkem also entered the start-up phase for a small plant in Quebec that converts old power utility poles into ethanol. Again, a good example of producing a valuable fuel (or green chemicals) using a feedstock that not only doesn’t cost anything, but through a tipping fee also represents a second revenue stream.

Ethanol might have its public-relations challenges but don’t write it off yet, not when we’re getting to a point where we can take organics/biomass from landfills, turn it into a useable fuel, and avoid landfill methane emissions in the process. Enerkem’s process also turns biomass and organic solid waste into the chemical building blocks for a slew of other products, including plastics, paints and solvents. And unlike electricity-producing incinerators, the ethanol-from-waste approach using gasification is an easier sell to jurisdictions that are wary of the whole “burning” and “smokestack” images associated with mass-burn incineration facilities.

I only wish one of these Enerkem plants were being considered for southern Ontario.

According to a Nexterra release, the gasification system “will replace ORNL’s existing natural gas steam plant by converting locally sourced woody biomass into clean burning syngas. The syngas will produce 60,000 lbs/hr of saturated steam to displace 75 MMBtu/hr of fossil fuel traditionally used to heat the campus.” Once the system is operational, it is expected to reduce fossil-fuel consumption on the campus by 80 per cent, removing about 20,000 tons per year of greenhouse-gas emissions — equivalent to taking 5,000 cars off the road.

I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback about the Nexterra system from a variety of people in the industry. Selling a system to an organization as high-profile and respected at Oak Ridge Lab is a major credibility booster, and represents a terrific public showcase of what the system can do in areas where wood waste is a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

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.