In months, Vancouver&rsquo;s largest suburb, Surrey, British Columbia, will be collecting 65,000 metric tons of organic waste a year from 105,000 single-family households and 35,000 multifamily high-rise units with collection trucks running on biogas generated from that very same waste&mdash;sort of. According to Rob Costanzo, manager of engineering operations for the city of Surrey, the estimated 120,000 gigajoules of biogas to be produced at the Surrey Biofuel Facility currently under construction adjacent to the Surrey Transfer Station will be sold to the local gas utility, FortisBC, and injected into the grid. Then, the fleet of up to 50 compressed natural gas (CNG) collection trucks will fill up on CNG at stations throughout the city at the same price. Costanzo says the city had the option to build a renewable natural gas delivery station on a 4-acre parcel at the biogas plant, &ldquo;but that didn&rsquo;t make much sense to us,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;The facility is located in the Northeast corner of the city, and it&rsquo;s a large city geographically&mdash;320 square kilometers (124 square miles) in size&mdash;so to fuel all of Surrey&rsquo;s CNG fleet there did not make logistical sense.&rdquo;&nbsp; The project, spurred by a regional mandate to divert 70 percent of waste from landfills, began in 2013 with a bid request. Eleven bids were received and narrowed to the top three, after which the city chose the experienced Netherlands-based Orgaworld, part of the Shanks Group, in a public-private partnership (P3) to design, build, finance, operate and maintain the facility under a 25-year contract. The cost of the plant is estimated at nearly CA$68 million, but through the P3 arrangement, Canada&rsquo;s federal government has agreed to pay up to 25 percent ($17 million). The Surrey Biofuel Facility will be sized to take in up to 115,000 tons of organic waste per year&mdash;including both yard waste and kitchen scraps. Costanzo says the city of Surrey is contracted to provide a minimum of 57,000 tons a year, and if, for whatever reason, it cannot meet that obligation, it&rsquo;s a &ldquo;put or pay&rdquo; arrangement. Conversely, Orgaworld is obligated to produce a minimum of 100,000 gigajoules of biogas in a &ldquo;produce or pay&rdquo; agreement, Costanzo says. However, the city expects to supply on average 65,000 tons, and the facility anticipates producing 120,000 gigajoules of biogas. The facility is sized to take in organics from surrounding municipalities as well, to make up the difference between what Surrey can provide and the plant&rsquo;s production capacity. The city plans to consume upwards of 65,000 gigajoules of biogas per year for its collection trucks and another 10,000 gigajoules per year for maintenance vehicles. Sales from the remainder will be split between Surrey and Orgaworld. &ldquo;We had a really robust education program when we converted from a two-bin system to a three-bin system,&rdquo; says Bruce Hayne, a Surrey City Councilor. &ldquo;Quickly, we got to 70 percent participation. When we make it easy for them, people want to do the right thing.&rdquo; Hayne says the city hasn&rsquo;t had to fine nonparticipating residents in the green-bin program&mdash;yet. &ldquo;Each bin has bar codes and there&rsquo;s cameras on the trucks,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;so if we wanted to, it would be quite easy to track compliance.&rdquo; The city&rsquo;s risk may seem low compared to Orgaworld&rsquo;s&mdash;essentially providing land, feedstock and tipping fees, the net cost of which Costanzo says is $65 a ton&mdash;considering Surrey owns the plant while Orgaworld designs, builds, finances, maintains and operates it. After 25 years, the contract may be renewed or not. The choice is the city&rsquo;s. Surrey&rsquo;s tipping fees are offset by what it charges residents for the three-bin pickup service, which is $283 a year for single-family households and $35 for apartment units. Orgaworld does not get revenue from gas sales, but Costanzo says sales from the finished compost from digestate&mdash;40,000 tons annually&mdash;goes entirely to Orgaworld. &ldquo;We didn&rsquo;t know where the market would sit when we made the contract,&rdquo; Costanzo says. &ldquo;The average cost then was $15 to $18 a ton, but fast forward to now, most municipalities are doing this, so we put a zero-dollar value on it. So Orgaworld is 100 percent responsible to produce and market that, and the sales go to them.&rdquo; The city may use around 2 tons a year of the compost for parks, medians and boulevards. Through the facility, the city may also be eligible to cash in on carbon offsets.&nbsp; Orgaworld Project Manager Ryan Lauzon says the biogas plant uses dry anaerobic digestion (AD) in a batch process with 10 dry tunnel-like digester vessels. &ldquo;The primary reason we use dry AD is it allows more flexibility for contaminants,&rdquo; Lauzon says. &ldquo;With the mixture of leaf, yard and food waste, we don&rsquo;t have to worry about particle size.&rdquo; For wet AD using this mixture, the feedstock would have to be pulped, using energy and water resources, and then the water must be dealt with. &ldquo;Here, we use no water or energy to pulp,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;We take the waste in, put it through a rough 4-inch grind and fill a tunnel.&rdquo; Each batch digests for 21 to 28 days, and every few days a new batch is started in one of the 10 vessels. Orgaworld has a wet digester, or fermenter, on-site and stores the liquid fermentate from the dry AD for recirculation on top of the digesters to keep breakdown active during the process. After day four, gas begins to be withdrawn from the vessel for cleaning and grid injection. Lauzon says Greenlane Biogas supplied the gas cleanup system on-site, which is a water-wash setup. FortisBC conducts gas quality checks routinely, and if any is rejected, it goes back into cleanup or is flared. The odor control technology used is state-of-the-art, Costanzo and Lauzon say. Everything is enclosed including compost vessels, unlike many sites where compost is windrowed and the pungent smell burdens those nearby. The building is kept under negative pressure, and the compost vessels use air from inside the facility for aerobic composting. Then, air from composting vessels goes through ammonia scrubbers after which the ammonia is stripped and the air is cooled and humidified before entering the biofilters, which consist of hardwood, root-wood torn branches. Finally, the air is forced up the 230-foot stack. The end result is 1 ppm odor at the property line. &ldquo;The odor mitigation is a big deal,&rdquo; Costanzo says. The Surrey Biofuel Facility broke ground May 2015 and is on track to be fully operational late April 2017. Today, Surrey residents&rsquo; organics are taken to a neighboring Richmond composting site. Tomorrow, they will power the city&rsquo;s collection fleet. &nbsp; Author: Ron Kotrba Senior Editor, Biomass Magazine 218-745-8347 rkotrba@bbiinternational.com

CLEAN ENERGY: The Surrey Biofuel Facility outside of Vancouver, British Columbiaâ€”designed, financed, operated and maintained by Orgaworld but owned by the cityâ€”is a new biogas plant that will use source-separated organics as feedstock. 

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The Canadian city of Surrey, British Columbia, prepares to open a new biogas plant fed by its residents' kitchen scraps and yard waste, the fuel from which will power its collection fleet of CNG vehicles.  

28 Days Later: Waste to Fuel

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