Toronto has a case of good gas
Monday, April 26th, 2010
My Clean Break column this morning takes a look at a few ambitious initiatives in Toronto that will take biogas from the city’s main landfill and two anaerobic digesters, clean it up, and use it as transportation fuel, to heat city buildings, or to generate electricity. Actually, there’s a fourth major initiative — take biogas from the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant and use it for a combined heat and power plant. Together, these four projects have the potential to generate more than 40 megawatts of electricity, not to mention waste heat that can be redeployed to offset natural gas use. But all the gas won’t necessarily be used to generate power. Biogas from the two anaerobic digesters could end up being used to fuel the city’s entire fleet of 285 waste trucks, which would be converted from diesel to natural gas.
It’s good to see these initiatives finally taking shape… This is methane that would otherwise be flared, so it makes enormous sense to capture it and use it to offset our dependence on coal and conventional natural gas, or in the context of transportation, diesel fuel. Read the column for more specifics about the projects.
Tyler Hamilton is associate publisher and editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and former business columnist for the Toronto Star. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005.
