Anaerobic digester project one step closer

By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express

Regional councillors will soon be looking at the possibility of bringing an anaerobic digester to Durham.

The region has recently contracted GHD, an engineering consultancy firm headquartered in Australia and with an office in Whitby, to help research and develop a business case for an anaerobic digester – facilities that use compost to generate biogas that, in turn, can be used to generate electricity – in Durham Region.

Hired in August, but first announced during a September meeting of the Energy from Waste – Waste Management Advisory Committee, GHD is due to present regional staff with a business case in mid-November.

From there, it will be off to regional councillors.

“If we get approval from council, then we move into phase three, which is the specification development and procurement activities,” Gioseph Annello, the region’s manager of waste planning and technical services, tells The Oshawa Express.

Annello says that should the business case receive council approval, shovels could be in the ground as early as 2018.

This past summer, several councillors and regional staff got a firsthand look at anaerobic digesters in action in France and Spain. The trip, which cost taxpayers more than $90,000, saw the group of eight visit sites in Lyon, Le Puy,  Montpellier and two in Barcelona. The year before, regional staff visited sites in Germany, Holland and France at a cost of more than $40,000.

The cost and length of the region’s contract with GHD was not provided to The Oshawa Express prior to press time. However, the region’s 2016 capital budget plans for $400,000 to go toward the “preliminary design and consultant investigation” of such a site. The document also projects $30 million to be included in the 2017 budget for a digester.

Trucks driving on region-made gas

With the business case being developed for an anaerobic digester, Annello says the region is looking at one possible use for the biogas that would be generated: powering the region’s waste collection vehicles.

“Once we’ve created this gas, that gas could be used…to drive turbines for electricity, or you could also create a renewable natural gas. That renewable natural gas could actually be compressed and use power collection vehicles,” he says.

“We could create a circular process here where the energy we use, we put back into our system.”

A similar system is to come into effect next year in Surrey, B.C. Under this initiative, the methane collected from the city’s anaerobic digester will be used to power Surrey’s collection trucks, as well as some of the city’s maintenance trucks.

Annello says the region is also looking at implementing a new system which would divert more recyclables placed in garbage bags to where they belong, and helping assure that only waste goes to the Durham York Energy Centre and only organic waste goes to the new digester.

“We still have…some recyclables in our bag, and we have a lot of organics in there. The waste that comes to us from multi-residential…is not very well sorted, and that’s mainly because of infrastructure issues. They don’t have separate chutes for organic versus garbage,” he says.

“So we’re working to also put in this complimentary technology whereby the multi-residential garbage, as well as the black bag garbage, goes into a pre-sort where they rip open the bags and separate out the recyclables and the organics, and then the true garbage will end up at the EFW and the remainder will be recycled or put through the (anaerobic digester).”

Annello says this option was looked at at the time of the incinerator’s development, but the technology just was not there yet.

“We looked at the technology way back then, but it wasn’t developed sufficiently enough at the time for it to be viable. We’ve had, in the last three years, some facilities that have demonstrated this technology.”