While the Alberta government remains hopelessly hooked on oil revenue, the province’s capital city is quietly leading a green revolution. This January, Edmonton became the first city to break ground on its own fully integrated waste-to-biofuel facility.

The plant, which should be in operation this year, aims at diverting 30% of household waste away from the landfill. This is on top of the almost 60% of waste that the city already weeds out through its massive composting facility.

According to the website, “over 100,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste residuals will be converted into 36 million litres of biofuels annually, reducing Alberta’s carbon dioxide (CO2) footprint by six million tonnes over the next 25 years—the equivalent of removing 42,000 cars off the road every year."

The trash "will then be heated to over 700 degrees C inside a biochamber where the bonds of the material will be cracked to form a synthetic gas (syngas) made of hydrogen and carbon monoxide,” reports Edmonton’s Vue Weekly. “Then it will be turned into 36 million litres of methanol and, in a few years' time, ethanol.”

This is actually the third such plant for Quebec-based Enerkem, says the company's vice president of government affairs and communications Marie-Hélène Labrie. The company also runs a pilot plant in Sherbrooke and a demonstration plant in Westbury. 

Labrie describes Enerkem's proprietary process for converting the waste into methanol as a "closed loop," meaning that there is no combustion involved, so greenhouse gas emissions are minimal.

"We don't need a lot of energy," she explains. "The process is autothermal so there's not a lot of energy needed for the front end of the process. We need a little bit of electricity and that's it."

The main criticism of biofuels has been focused on the vast amount of farmland it requires. Dr David Stuart, Associate Chair of the Biochemistry Department at the University of Alberta and a specialist in biofuels, believes that this plant is accomplishing the opposite. "One of the traditional arguments against plant-based biofuels is that you need arable land to grow the plants to turn into fuel and that pushes out food crops," he says. "That's not an issue here because you're just taking stuff that's waste that would normally be going in to landfills, taking up useful land and they're converting it into something useful."

He says the attitude in the city toward the plant has been quite favourable, particularly because it's a "safe process" which produces very little waste material of its own. "The plant itself is really state-of-the-art," he gushes. "It's really far ahead in terms of what's going on in other places."

Although the methanol the plant creates is not quite ready to go directly into cars, he believes that just finding a useful outlet for the large amounts of waste the city produces makes the project worthwhile. 

"You can think of this in two ways, really. Yes, you're making fuel, but almost more importantly, you're dealing with nuisance material without putting it into landfill or just burning it. That's the other option, of course, with that kind of waste material is just burning it. But that puts CO2 in the air and the energy goes to no useful purpose."

Stuart sees no reason that a biofuel plant like this could not be a part of every city's waste management strategy. But, he cautions, a project like this requires a great deal of "political will." 

"The municipality, the city and the province have put money into this and that's what you need," he says. "It's not the sort of thing that a single private investor is going put money into."

This year’s federal budget included a $325 million investment in clean technologies over 8 years, less than half of the amount suggested by a coalition of 700 environmental groups, including the Pembina Institute. 

Image credit: handout via Enerkem

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