for a full scale Enerkem waste-to-biofuels facility. “This is a standard size scale built around the scale of the gasifier,” Lynch explains. “That gasifier is designed to handle about 100,000 dry metric tons of waste each year, which translates to about 300 dry metric tons each day, and then when you add the moisture content it comes to about 350 tons per day. That’s the core, standard scale module for Enerkem. So for facilities and opportunities that needed more, we would place multiple gasifiers.” In the case of Calgary, for example, Lynch says the city’s waste supply is large enough to fuel between four and six of the Enerkem gasifier plants, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that six plants should be built there. “You don’t want to complete with recy-cling,” Lynch says. “The thing we focus on is making sure that we’re complementing current recycling and composting efforts.” In addition to potential opportuni-ties for growth in Alberta, Enerkem is also looking at potential expansion of its facilities in the Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver areas, in addition to interna-tional opportunities. This past October, Enerkem sub-mitted a proposal for construction of a US$200 million waste-to-biofuels refinery in Rosemount, Minn. in partnership with Minnesota-based SKB Environmental. The biorefinery would be built and operated next to an SKB landfill. The company is also in talks with other U.S. companies, as well as companies in the Netherlands, U.K., Germany and China. “There’s a real need on the waste side, just to dispose of the waste,” Lynch says. “Then you’ve got all the opportunities on the product side. Not only can you pro-duce methanol and ethanol, but the meth-anol and ethanol are key intermediates that go into a lot of other products and chemicals. For example, you could get into things like acetic acid, acrylic acid, eth-ylene propylene – all sorts of things where you may not realize where they are used right away, but they are used in basically everything.” To produce the additional chemicals, Enerkem only needs to bolt on an addi-tional unit to the methanol production process. “We’ve got a core process that pro-duces methanol from waste and we’ll then bolt on the ethanol portion to give us the capability to go to ethanol,” Lynch says. “That could just as easily be a meth-anol-to-ethylene portion, or methanol to propylene, or methanol to acrylic acid, so you’ve got the full optionality to really go to whatever you want. And methanol itself is a ubiquitously used chemical that’s used everywhere around the world… but just by itself it’s a great fuel and it’s a great feedstock.” HOW IT ALL STARTED The project has come a long ways since it started out as a research for a pilot project at the University of Sherbrooke in 1999. In 2003, the pilot project began and the results were promising. “We successfully demonstrated about 20 different feedstocks including different types of biomass and ways of recycling plastics and plastic blends with biomass,” Lynch explains. “The economics looked good. We demonstrated that we could clean the syngas on a pilot scale and run that through a methanol reactor.” After years of careful planning and obtaining the necessary financing, the waste-to-biofuels industrial demonstra-tion plant was commissioned in 2009 in Westbury, Que. with the facility pro-cessing 48 tons a day of feedstock input. Enerkem was able to complete its design process development around the demo plant, which helped the company plan out its full-scale commercial plant. “One of the biggest challenges with these biomass facilities is scale-up, so we really wanted to make sure we did a thorough job and didn’t skip and steps,” Lynch says. “We wanted to make sure we took our time and proved every step of our technology before we went to the next step.” FUTURE CHALLENGES The biggest challenge Lynch sees moving forward will be related to deployment. “We’ve got our first plant here up and running, but how do you do this three or four times a year around the world,” he says. “I think there’s going to be a big growth challenge. We’re bracing for that now by planning ahead with our next facilities coming.” To enable its international growth, the company has developed its plants based on a standardized modular approach with pre-fabricated modules. This allows to deploy more than one project at a time. Feedstock variation around the world could also present some challenges. “Not all garbage is created the same,” Lynch says. “It’s a matter of anticipating the problems and testing, so we’re evaluating the different feedstocks.” If the company continues to grow as planned, facilities like the one in Edmonton could have a significant impact in reducing greenhouse gases everywhere. • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 20 Canadian BIOMASS 2014-11-18 2:22 PM allied blower biomass novdec14.indd 1
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