INNOVATION May-June 2013

Bakerview Ecodairy in Abbotsford is not just BC’s but Canada’s first small farm to experiment with collecting and using biogas. It received $240,000 from the BC Bioenergy Network in 2010 to install an anaerobic digester to process the manure from the farm’s 50 cows, along with milk waste, over a period of 21 to 30 days. The biogas is converted into electricity using a 20 kW generator. Enough power is created—175,000 kWh per year—to

Investing in Potential Given the number of landfills and wastewater treatment plants around Canada—and the world—the potential mar- ket and profits are huge, which explains why Quadrogen is staking its future on finding an economical way of cleaning biogas. Prasad figures the global market for clean-up systems is $15 billion.

meet all the farm’s energy needs. But converting cow manure into useable biogas is easy compared with converting the relatively dirty biogas from landfills. “On a scale of one to 10, with ten being the most challenging, landfill gas is 10 out of 10, says Alakh Prasad, P.Eng., president and CEO of Quadrogen Power Systems. “It’s very challenging.” And cow manure? “That’s a two out of 10.” Which might make you wonder why Quadrogen and others have set their sights on landfill gas, with all its impuri- ties. Because landfills contain man-made waste along with organic waste, they contain contaminants that aren’t present in biogas from only organic sources. Siloxanes are particularly troublesome. They’re added to many consumer prod- ucts including cosmetics, shampoos and detergents, so they end up in landfills and wastewater treatment plants. If siloxanes aren’t removed before the biogas is processed, they’re converted into a material that chemically and physi- cally approximates sand, causing signifi- cant damage to turbines and generators. According to Dick McCarrick, an analyst with Environmental Leader , a trade publication in Colorado, there are six main technologies for remov- ing siloxanes, among them activated carbon (the most commonly used), activated alumina, refrigeration and membrane technology. To date, none of them is ideal. He writes, “the primary criterion for a biogas cleaning technology is effi- cacy, for instance the ability to remove siloxanes to a level where the biogas is no longer a danger to use in delicate motors. Ideally, this would be below the 100 parts-per-billion range.” McCarrick also notes that “accord- ing to one report, removal of siloxanes can save a five million-gallon-per-day wastewater treatment facility $60,000 to $130,000 per year in operating costs.”

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