Region making the case for anaerobic digestion

By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express

Regional councillors will soon have a say on whether Durham will move forward on a project that has already seen hundreds of thousands of dollars invested into it.

Set to come to council chambers this spring, staff will be presenting a business case for the construction of an anaerobic digester, which uses compost and other green waste to generate biofuel, which can then be used to generate electricity or power waste collection vehicles, as has been suggested in the past.

The recently passed regional budget allocates $800,000 to go towards the development and construction of the project – something that had some councillors uneasy, as it’s more spending on a project that has not yet received council approval.

“I don’t think the issue at hand is the fact of whether we should pursue this. I think…we are putting the cart before the horse. It looks like we are being asked to make a lot of big money decisions without having all the information,” Councillor Shaun Collier of Ajax said during the most recent meeting of regional council.

“What I saw in the budget with the $800,000 and I saw the word construction, which really made me think that we are much further down this road than we should be. I would’ve hoped that we would’ve seen the business case by now after having all this work done. And I think that’s where I’m getting concerned because I feel we’re being almost pushed to make a decision.”

In a report presented to councillors in January, staff estimated that the anaerobic digester project would cost approximately $44 million. Staff also suggested that in order to pay for this project as well as a proposed waste pre-sort facility valued at $28 million, the region take out a debenture, or loan, for the full $72 million and then use the funds it received through the federal gas tax fund to pay it off.

This echoes the same maneuver done by the region to cover the cost of the Durham York Energy Centre, which has cost just under $300 million. The region expects that the incinerator will be paid off by 2019.

tAnother potential roadblock was raised by the late Councillor Nancy Diamond, saying that her colleagues should be cautious about moving forward with this project before hearing back from the province and its upcoming strategy paper on waste diversion in Ontario.

“My concern is that we are moving ahead with decisions before we have information. That by proceeding today, for example, with the $800,000 towards anaerobic digestion, we are making decisions where the province…is going to be making significant changes within the next year,” she said.

“The reality is we’re making a decision before we know what’s coming.”

That strategy paper concluded its public consultation process at the end of January.  The province has not provided any timeline as to when the paper will move forward. It is because of this uncertainty that Diamond called for the region to put the anaerobic digester project on hold.

“I believe that this report should be delayed for one year,” she said.

“I believe that we should be waiting for the province because they have the right to legislate what it is that we can do and the consequences for us could be very, very significant in getting us into a process that we’re not ready for and we very well may not need.”

However, Mirka Januszkiewicz, the region’s director of waste management, says that a delay isn’t the answer, and that the region should move ahead with the project should it be given the green light by council due to current composting deals coming to an end next year, as well as wanting to potentially get funds from the province for the digester’s construction.

“We want to capitalize on the opportunity for the funding. There’s also a need to plan our strategy to move forward, 2018 is going to be a critical year for the Region of Durham as all of our contracts, including our contract for the aerobic composting, will expire. The decision will have to be made this year on how we’re moving forward,” she said.

“Because of the contract, because of opportunities and because of the provincial policies which are coming, this is the time, I believe, that we should move forward with the preferred solution. We started on this journey…in 2009. Every year, we’re doing more studies and moving into this direction, and we are now comfortable that we have sufficient waste, organic waste, to move forward with (anaerobic digestion).”

While Januszkiewicz says that the region produces enough green waste to sustain an anaerobic digester, no distinction on the size of such a facility has been given. However, speaking with the Oshawa Express in May 2016, Chris Duke, a biogas program analyst with the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, said that he did not foresee a large digester, such as the Heartland Biogas facility in Colorado that can produce 50 megawatts of power, coming to Ontario because there would not be enough waste to make such a facility viable.

“One thing that we don’t have here in Ontario is very large feedlots or those very large dairy farms,” he said at the time.

“We do have large dairy farms, but not to the size you’d see in the States. We don’t have very large pig farms either, which you’d see in the United States.”

Money already spent

When the case for the anaerobic digester project is presented to councillors for final approval, the Region of Durham will have budgeted more than $1 million on the project, taking into account money approved in this year’s spending plan.

According to a review of regional budgets dating back to 2010, The Oshawa Express has found $1.75 million budgeted by the region on the anaerobic digester file.

The first instance, $50,000 towards preliminary design and consultations, was listed in the 2011 budget’s capital forecast as spending to take place that year.

Money wasn’t officially budgeted again until 2015, when $500,000 was put towards the development of an organics plan and anaerobic digester in the Region of Durham. The 2016 budget put $400,000 towards the same item.

In the recently passed 2017 budget, councillors approved $800,000 to go towards the development and construction of an organics plan and anaerobic digester. The capital forecast in the 2017 budget, which lays out expected spending by the region in future years, lists $72 million – the amount previously cited as a debenture to cover both a digester and a pre-sort facility – as expected spending for 2018.

Joanne Paquette, a spokesperson for the region’s works department, says that of the $500,000 budgeted in 2015, only $50,000 was spent, going towards a review on anaerobic digester technology. The $400,000 budgeted in 2016 was put toward the business case coming forward this year.

Paquette did not say what the money budgeted in 2011 went towards, or if it was fully spent.

What is known is how some of the money was spent by the Region of Durham on trips overseas to investigate anaerobic digestion.

In 2015, staff visited sites in Germany, Holland and France at a cost of more than $40,000. The next year, a group of nine representatives from the Region of Durham visited sites in France and Spain. Speaking at regional council, Jim Clapp, the region’s finance commissioner, said the final cost of the trip came to $104,000.

As previously reported in The Oshawa Express, that latter trip included a number of visits to tourist sites, such as the Palace of Versailles outside of Paris and the Sagrada Familia Basillica in Barcelona, as well as a sightseeing cruise in Paris, on days when the contingent was not taking part in regional business.

Those expenses were approved by the region’s finance department.