Cogen Project Inside GM Canada’s $28 million cogen project using renewable landfill gas By Ellen Cools Green generation landfills in Ontario – met with Carolyne Watts, plant director at the St. Catharines Propulsion Plant, to discuss the possi-bility of using gas from the landfill as a source of renewable fuel at the plant. Carolyne voiced her support and the two companies, along with their part-ner, Integrated Gas Recovery Services (IGRS), began planning the project. The partners ultimately agreed to build a 3.3-kilometre-long pipeline to carry the LFG from the Walker landfill to GM Canada’s plant. FROM PLANNING TO COMMISSIONING s more emphasis is placed on fostering a green economy, large businesses are investing in new ways to power their operations with renewable sources. GM Canada is one such business. In Au-gust 2020, the company announced it had completed a $28 million cogeneration proj-ect that uses renewable landfill gas (LFG) from a local landfill to power and heat its St. Catharines, Ont., Propulsion Plant. This venture aligned with the compa-ny’s sustainability targets, Tammy Giroux, GM Canada’s manager of government re-lations, tells Canadian Biomass . “One of those targets is that we source 100 per cent of our electricity from re-newable sources by 2040, to support our overall vision of being a company that has zero emissions,” she says. The project began in late 2016, when Mike Watt, executive vice-president of Walker Industries – an organics recov-ery company that runs one of the largest A The process for executing the cogen initia-tive, from planning through to commission-ing, took just over four years, Giroux says. “Like any good project, there was the initial timeline and then the actual time-line,” she says, laughing. The partners ran into a few challenges along the way. The pipeline that carries the LFG runs through property con-trolled by the Niagara Escarpment Com-mission and the St. Lawrence Seaway Au-thority. As such, the companies needed approval for the proposed pipeline from these groups. This took much longer than expected – more than three-and-a-half years, Watt explains. Once all the necessary plans and con-tracts were in place, construction began on the pipeline in 2019. But, when COVID-19 hit in March 2020, construction was delayed for a few weeks while the companies instituted the necessary health and safety protocols. “There were delays at both sites in terms of getting a major green energy construc-tion project completed right in the mid-dle of COVID,” Watt says. “That covered probably most of our construction window here, so we’re pretty happy that we man-aged to get this up and running through all of that.” (From left to right) Walter Sendzik, Mayor of St. Catharines; Jim Bradley, regional chair; Carolyne Watts, St. Catharines Propulsion Plant director; St. Catharines MPP Jennie Stevens; Geordie Walker, CEO of Walker Industries; MP Chris Bittle; and David Paterson, GM Canada vice-president of corporate and environmental affairs, celebrate the commissioning of the St. Catharines Propulsion Plant cogeneration facility. Photo credit: Ann Power. 18 Canadian BIOMASS WINTER 2021
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