Cover Story Construction of the gasifier is underway at Enerkem’s commercial plant in Edmonton. Turning Waste into Fuel Enerkem’s Edmonton facility produces cellulosic ethanol from waste. By Andrew Macklin production of biofuel from waste has taken a step for-ward in Canada, as the country’s first full-scale commercial plant for the production of cellulosic ethanol hits the construction phase. The proprietary ther-mochemical technology platform created by Enerkem is providing the City of Edmonton with another component for its world-class waste management facility. The City of Edmonton has already estab-lished itself as a world leader in waste man-agement. Before the Enerkem project began, the city was already diverting close to 60% of its municipal waste away from its landfill. Among its innovations, Edmonton has a pa-per recycling plant on the site of the waste management facility, and the recycled paper T he products created are used as the paper stock for the municipality. The $131-million project includes the feedstock prep facility, a commercial plant, and the Advanced Energy Research facil-ity. The $100-million waste-to-biofuels commercial plant will be owned and op-erated by Enerkem; the remaining $31 million covers the cost of the Integrated Transfer and Processing Facility and the Advanced Energy Research Facility. These two facilities are owned and operated by the City of Edmonton. The commercial biofuels plant will run all day, every day, in order to process the volume of residential and commercial waste that will be taken in. The resulting production volume is estimated at 4,500 litres of fuel grade cellulosic ethanol per hour, and approximately 38 million litres of cellulosic ethanol over the course of a year. That volume represents approxi-mately 14% of the ethanol needed by the province of Alberta to meet Canada’s 5% ethanol blend requirements for fuel. enerkem’s technOlOgy Since 2000, Enerkem has been working on research and development projects that would allow the company to pro-duce a commercial-size waste-to-biofuels plant. Headquartered in Montreal, the company, founded by the father and son team of Esteban and Vincent Chornet, has been working on validating its proprietary technology for the last decade. The end January/February 2013 18 Canadian BIOMASS
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