There’s enough electricity to power all the homes, offices
and retail businesses, but not quite enough to supply several of the town’s
biggest industries.
There’s also an equal amount of energy generated as heat and
so far that’s just blowing out of a stack, but it could someday heat
greenhouses or perhaps dry skim milk or fruits and vegetables.
Most of the garbage comes from food processing companies,
but significant volume also comes from the green bin program for Peel Region
and fats, oils and greases from restaurants and cafeterias.
It’s the only plant that has developed technology to take
off wrappers, such as plastic and cardboard, to extract the food ingredients.
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| Paul Taylor, left, and Donald J. (Buck) Ross at Bio-En Inc., ElmiraAdd caption |
That was the mechanical ingenuity of Earl Brubacher, who has
spent a career working for Martin-family businesses in and around Elmira, and
Derek Martin, who handles the computer end of things.
After the garbage passes through the biodigester, there’s
valuable fertilizer in liquid form that tests .4 per cent nitrogen, .2 phosphorous and .08 potash, which is a
relatively balanced blend that can be applied to field crops.
Paul Taylor, manager of New Business Development, says it
has done particularly well on hay and pasture fields, but most is taken by
cash-crop farmers.
The Elmira plant generates 2.85 megawatts of electricity per
hour, and after the launch in March, 2014, is now running at capacity.
It’s a continuous process, fully automated, running day and
night, all week long. The only employees at the plant are handling truck
traffic, bringing feedstock in, shipping fertilizer out in tractor-trailer
tanker units.
It would have been up and running years earlier, but
neighbours objected because they feared there would be obnoxious odours and too
much truck traffic.
In practice, the plant was up and running for seven weeks
when one of the leading opponents asked when the plant would open. He hadn’t
noticed any odours or increased truck traffic.
The Elmira plant is the culmination of a dream by the late
George Piller, a chicken farmer, former owner of Piller’s Meats and
Delicatessens Ltd. of Waterloo, and a partner in a number of ventures by a team
of Elmira businessmen, led by the late Donnie Martin of Martin Feed Mills and
Martin Pet Foods.
Piller, who was born in Austria, wanted to launch a
biodigester here similar to ones he had seen operating in Austria. He took friends
to see the plants and persuaded them to invest.
Chief among the investors is Donnie Martin’s son, Chuck, and
Derek, the computer whiz, is his grandson. Another grandson, Chris, also works
at the business.
Piller’s son, Tony, is a director. Others on the original
team of investors are Donald J. (Buck) Ross, who farms near Arthur, Mahlon Frey
and the late Harold Wideman.
They hold rights to market the Agrinz Technologies
biodigesters and have designed and built them at Leamington, Hanover, Nicaragua
and are in the planning stages for more, including one in India.
The one at Leamington generates 3.2 megawatts per hour and
the one at Hanover, on a beef farm, generates .75 megawatts.
The Leamington biodigester, owned by Seacliff Energy also
heats a large greenhouse complex that grows organic tomatoes.
The electricity is sold to the Independent Electricity
Systems Operator under the province’s somewhat controversial FIT program, which
also signed 20-year contracts to kick-start the solar and wind power
electricity generators.
There are about a dozen biodigesters operating in Ontario
now, but only four the size of the Bio-En Power Inc. projects.
To avoid ruinous competition for feedstock, they now buy
through Cornerstone Renewables which has two employees handling procurement.
Among the things they have taken are foods condemned by
health units and surplus skim milk.
The process includes heating the inputs to 50 degrees
Celsius, which pasteurizes the feedstock. That, in turn, enabled the company to
gain certification from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for its fertilizer.
It is also certified by the Ontario Ministry of Environment
as a waste handler and, of course, as an electricity supplier.
“It’s a win-win-win situation for everybody,” says Ross, who
is keenly interested in projects that improve the environment.
He figures Ontario's farmers, researchers and entrepreneurs could develop technologies that will be marketable around the globe.
And he says the provincial and federal governments would be
better advised to invest in these kinds of projects than in others aimed at
curbing greenhouse gases.
He takes a large volume of the Elmira plant’s distillates to
store in what once was a liquid manure holding tank, applying it to his 700
acres of crops when the timing is appropriate.
The plant at Elmira took 11 years from proposal to
completion. Today, with experience behind the successful launch of
commercial-scale biodigesters, they can be up and running in less than two
years, says Taylor.
