INNOVATION May-June 2013

f ea t u r e s

From Trash Heap to

BC firm Quadrogen is taking Biogas Cleaning to the Next Phase

Quadrogen plans to clean piped gas from the Vancouver Landfill in Delta for energy use in Village Farms International’s commercial greenhouse operation.

Suzanne Morphet

capturing biogas from the landfill in Salmon Arm and upgrading it to pipeline-quality natural gas. Ten days later, it announced it would duplicate the process at the Kelowna landfill. Suddenly, it seems, biogas is big. “There’s been some fundamental changes in energy pricing,” explains Michael Weedon, Executive Director of the BC Bioenergy Network. “Oil for most of this century has been about $10 a barrel but now it’s $100…That now has made it more attractive for even us in BC to look at biogas collection.” Buying into Biogas Biogas is the modern moniker for the gas that’s produced when organic matter rots in an anaerobic environment such as a land- fill. Other sources of biogas include wastewater treatment plants and animal manure. All biogas contains a variety of gases, mainly methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, some oxygen and—depending on the source— a number of impurities. In some countries, where other forms of energy are in short supply, the methane in biogas has been used for decades, if not centuries. “In Europe, for over 30 years they’ve have been capturing biomethane in agricultural applications, so it’s well estab- lished,” says Weedon. “In BC we haven’t been doing that until recently.” The Quadrogen Biogas Clean-up Unit installed at Orange County Sanitation District Waste Water Treatment Plant has been successfully removing pollutants on an impressive scale.

Considering how long landfills around the province have been seen as only passive receptacles for waste, developments in the past decade— particularly, the past few years—seem almost too good to be true. First there was Maxim Power’s groundbreaking project in 2003 to turn methane gas from Vancouver’s landfill in Delta into electricity and heat. The 5.6 MW electric and 6.7 MW thermal co-generation facility was later expanded and followed by a smaller 1.6 MW power plant at Victoria’s Hartland landfill. Then, in 2009 Cedar Road Bioenergy demonstrated a modular system for converting biogas into energy at smaller landfills, such as the one in Nanaimo. Last February, Vancouver-based Quadrogen Power Systems announced it had received a million dollars towards a $7.9 million project to take some of the biogas from the landfill in Delta and turn it into electricity, heat, hydrogen and greenhouse-quality carbon dioxide. And, by November of last year, FortisBC announced it was in on the action. After years of planning, it was successfully

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