City looks to garbage for renewable power

WINNIPEG, MANITOBA - The City of Winnipeg is proposing a landfill gas and resource recovery project that could turn thousands of tonnes of harmful greenhouse gases into a renewable energy resource.

The city is currently asking for bidders to design, build, finance and operate a project at the Brady Road landfill to collect and flare gas for a 20-year term.

Proposals from companies wanting to use the gas from the landfill are being accepted until February 26, after which the city will have an evaluation period.

“There’s a number of ideas out there. Really the whole idea of the proposal is that we want the market to tell us what they think is the best thing to do,” explained Darryl Drohomerski, manager of the solid wastes department for the City of Winnipeg.

“We’re not the experts in it at all, we’re putting it out so that companies bidding on it would have the expertise to do that work.”

The requirements of the proposal are flexible enough to allow bidders to use the gas as they wish, so long as their design is able to flare 1,000 standard cubic feet per metre for their 20-year term. The technology to extract the gas from the landfill is similar to drilling oil wells and is essentially the same with each company. What separates the bidders is what they would like to do with the gas once it has been extracted.

“The landfill needs to be engineered with a series of gas wells extracting the biogas as it is produced,” explained Jan Oleszkiewicz, professor of civil engineering at the University of Manitoba.

“The gas may then be used to run generators directly or can be used as it is cleaned from contaminants.”

Oleszkiewicz further explained that the procedure is fairly complex and significantly adds to the costs of operating a landfill.

“Careful operation is necessary as this gas is explosive when mixed with air,” said Oleszkiewicz. Two of the most standard uses for the gas are to convert it into electricity or into fuel for heating buildings.

“A company could build a generating station to produce electricity, or you could do things like convert it into a gas that you would use to run a fleet of buses or something like that,” said Drohoerski.

The gas can be easily converted into electricity, although it would not be enough to fill the high energy demand posed by a large city such as Winnipeg said Oleskiewicz.

“However biogas extraction from landfills appears to be the right thing to do due to the current concern for reducing the amount of greenhouse-effect producing gases released to the atmosphere,” said Oleszkiewicz. Bidders also have the option proposing a system of recovering and reusing material destined for disposal. “There are a number of new firms out there that will do things like take all of your garbage and convert it into an energy source or a heat source that... may be beneficial to a city at large over what we’re doing right now,” said Drohoerski.

“In the U.S., for example, there are a lot of landfills in large cities that have what’s called a waste-to-energy plant.... All the garbage is put into a giant incinerator and the garbage is burned, and then is converted into electricity.”

The University of Manitoba has expressed interest in partnering with the City of Winnipeg on the project.

“We could offset almost half of the university’s natural gas consumption. It’s amazing. That project will pay for itself in less than five years. It’s just an incredible opportunity for saving money,” said Mike Ferley, U of M energy advocate, in an interview with the Manitoban in October 2008.

Ferley said that working on this project would improve the university’s sustainability drastically. “This is a $15 million project and if we were to fund (the project) out of endowment funds we’d be looking very green. Super green.”

Similar projects have been done in cities across Canada, such as Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary.

The city is hoping for construction to begin this September, though some form of operation is predicted to start earlier in the year.