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Achieving high solids anaerobic digestion

Harvest Power's renewable energy site in B.C. will be a first in North America

Achieving high solids anaerobic digestion

by Keith Barker

Fraser Richmond Soil & Fibre Ltd. (FRSF) has been in operation since 1993. Over the years at their award-winning site in Richmond, B.C. they have developed into one of North America’s largest permitted food and yard waste compost facilities. The company has advanced technologies that have resulted in high levels of odour control using biofiltration, have achieved production rates of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of organic materials every year, and have successfully marketed manufactured soil products all over Western Canada. 

As FRSF sought to grow their business and explored the potential for renewable energy production, they began to collaborate with Harvest Power Canada Ltd. Discussions led to close cooperation, and in October, 2009, FRSF became a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvest Power.

In January of this year Harvest announced that their FRSF site was selected to receive an expected $2.5 to $5 million from the government of Canada’s Clean Energy Fund. The funding is in support of the company’s proposed high-solids anaerobic digestion (HSAD) plant and renewable energy project, which will be the first of its kind in North America, and which will use both residential and commercial food waste, as well as yard waste from Metro Vancouver, as feedstock.   

“Harvest has already made dramatic progress in our goal of becoming the first commercial HSAD facility in Canada, and this grant from the Canadian Clean Energy Fund positions us to achieve that goal in the near future,” says Paul Sellew, Harvest’s founder and CEO. “We are especially excited by this project because of the incredible potential of HSAD to serve as a fundamental pillar in the North American organic waste management portfolio.”  

Currently, Harvest is composting all materials at their FRSF site, and is set to begin construction on the first phase of the new HSAD facility, which will process approximately 30,000 tons of organic waste every year. The new facility will also produce nearly 6,800 MWh/yr of electricity – enough electricity to power over 500 homes. This phase, according to Harvest Power, will be operational by the end of 2011.  

HSAD technology
Harvest’s new facility will use high-solids anaerobic digestion (HSAD) technology developed and engineered by the German company GICON Bioenergie, who, as of November, 2010, formed a technology development partnership with Harvest Power. GICON’s technology, which is well proven in Europe, efficiently biodegrades dry organic waste (such as urban food and yard waste) in a two-stage system that maximizes throughput, as well as system stability and methane concentration in the resulting renewable biogas.   

Under the terms of the new partnership, Harvest has exclusive rights and owns the patents to GICON’s high-solids AD technology in North America, and GICON will be responsible for plant engineering.   

“They are providing the technology and engineering and we’re handling the construction and owning and operating,” explains Sellew.  

“In searching for the right partner, we conducted extensive due diligence on the most promising companies and saw an array of impressive anaerobic technologies. There’s a significant base of biogas facilities in Germany (over 6,000) so there’s a well-developed industry there, and so we wanted to take advantage of that experience. We feel that by working with GICON, we’re doing that. We chose GICON [in part] because of its unique two-stage batch digestion design that enables shorter retention times and higher biomethane yields.”  

GICON’s eight facilities in Europe produce 11 MW of power and process 171,000 tonnes per year of diverse organic material, and the company’s team of experienced engineers has been involved in the design of over seventy facilities in twelve countries, processing one million tonnes per year.  

Location, location, location
Sellew says Harvest selected Vancouver as the location for building the first high solids anaerobic digestion plant in North America for several reasons. Vancouver’s organic waste diversion has been increasing since Earth Day 2010, when the food waste diversion program for Metro Vancouver was officially launched. Sellew says that Vancouver is a progressive part of the country, where there are good policies in place for organics diversion, and he says it’s also an ideal location for their operation because of the simple fact that for high solids, you need yard waste, and it needs to be available 12 months per year. 

  “We basically take in the organic waste (food processing and residential food waste), and we mix it with the yard waste inside an enclosed negative-air receiving building,” explains Sellew.

“Then we take the mixture and load it via front end loaders into digesters, which are air-tight and gas-tight. The microbes take over from there, and begin digesting the organic waste. Their by-products are biogas, which is basically methane and CO2. Then we take that biogas and convert it into electricity and thermal energy.”  

“For odour control, we use biofiltration. Everything is dumped inside of the receiving hall, which is under negative air-pressure, so when the doors are open, air is drawn into the building, and we exhaust that air through a biofilter, which destroys the odours before anything is released to the atmosphere.” Sellew also says that with high solids in an anaerobic digestion system, there’s no run-off.  

“Because we’re dealing with higher solids content material, basically it doesn’t need water and it doesn’t generate water.”  

“In London, Ontario, we also have North America’s largest low solids anaerobic facility under construction,” says Sellew. “There’s very good organics diversion policies in place in Ontario as well, and we find Canadian policies in general are moving closer to where Western European policies are. It’s one of the reasons we’re investing in Canada.”  

“Right now, in Germany, close to 4.5 million homes are powered (heat and electricity) through biogas facilities,” says Sellew. “And if you look at the German economy, in comparison to the North American economy, it’s roughly 15 percent. So the opportunity to take this model which has successfully been rolled out in countries like Germany, and bring it over to North America, is incredible.”  

“I think energy from organic waste is the next generation of solar energy,” continues Sellew. “In effect, you capture the energy in organic waste which is there through photosynthesis. So we’re basically breaking it down in a cost-effective way which also generates baseload power. We’re generating power 24/7, 365 days per year, so its a good compliment to the other renewable energy options out there.”   

“At the same time, we’re capturing the nutrients in organic matter, and putting that back into the soil. So, we can’t forget about the importance of that.”  

Company info

7028 York Rd
Richmond, BC
CA, V6W 0B1

Website:
harvestpower.com

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