A test site for Plasco's plasma-gasification technology is being erected at the Trail Road landfill site in the suburbs of west Ottawa. The test facility will process 85 tonnes per day of the city's waste.

That waste is broken down by a plasma torch to the synthetic level. The flame produced is 8,000°C and is hotter than the sun's surface.

The gas created has the energy to run a turbine that generates electricity. The electricity created will partially be used to run the facility, and the rest will be sold to the City of Ottawa.

From the 85 tonnes of waste processed, approximately 4.1 megawatts of electricity will be generated each day. Only 0.9 megawatts of that will be used to power the facility, leaving enough electricity to power approximately 3,000 homes.

Photo courtesy of SDTC
A test site for Plasco's plasma-gasification technology is being erected at the Trail Road landfill site in the suburbs of west Ottawa. The test facility will process 85 tonnes per day of the city's waste.

It is a completely closed process with no emissions being released. There is still a small amount of material left over, but the upside is that it can be used in conjunction with asphalt in the construction of roads.

"Once it gets going you can see it becomes a very efficient user of energy and also a creator of new energy," says Vicky Sharpe, president and CEO of Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC).

SDTC provided $6.6 million in funding for the project. The total cost for the facility, according to Sharpe, will be $21.3 million, although Plasco will not release any official figures because of the competition in the field.

Plasco applied for the funding from SDTC, going up against 22 other proposals from companies pushing a range of sustainable technologies.

"It is a very competitive process, but the range of technologies that would be in any one round of applications vary widely. It doesn't compete, necessarily, against a like kind of project," says Sharpe. "It just competes in terms of its own merit as to whether it is really substantially answering real-world issues as we see it."

Plasco sees plasma gasification as an effective answer to waste problems many cities are having.

The test project will go for two years. Plasco is absorbing all costs of running and building the facility, only charging a tonnage fee for the waste being delivered to the facility. This is a standard fee landfills charge for all waste delivered.

Assuming the test project in Ottawa goes well, Plasco hopes to build a larger facility in the area.

"We will move to a minimum of 20 tonnes (in a larger facility)," says Randy Bennett, Plasco's vice-president of business development.

The City of Ottawa collects about 500 tonnes of waste each day, not including the waste that larger companies and corporations collect themselves.

"All their waste is picked up separately, which adds several more hundred tonnes," says Bennett.

Despite this huge number, Bennett claims that if the city goes for it, Plasco could build a facility big enough to handle all the waste now going to area landfills.

Plasco is already looking at expanding to other cities. President and CEO Rod Bryden was quoted in the Toronto Star last year saying: "This system would process all of Toronto's waste if the city chose."

Toronto's waste is currently being shipped across the border to Michigan. This arrangement has been getting a lot of flak from the U.S. side, and the deal is set to expire in 2008, unless the option of extending the deal to 2010 is taken.

Plasco's plasma-gasification process could be just what Toronto, and other cities, are looking for to cure the continuing headaches of what to do with solid waste.

The concept of plasma gasification has been around for decades, but it has never been efficient enough, or cost effective, until now.

The technology being used by Plasco was partially developed at the National Research Council in Ottawa.

Since 2004, Plasco has had a small facility in Spain that has been used to demonstrate its technology to potential customers, and continue research in this field.

"The plant in Spain is a true research plant. We use it to do research improvements, we use it to do, at the moment, customer demonstrations, and we're using it to verify what we're going to do here in Ottawa," says Bennett. "It's a much smaller facility. The one here in Ottawa will be about 15 times larger."

The pilot facility will be finished in a matter of months, but will not be working at full capacity until summer 2007.

"Because it's a demonstration program and because it's the first plant we've built of this size, our plan is it is going to be up and down, up and down, up and down until this time next year when we move into full blown 24-hour-a-day type operation," says Bennett.

(Devon Babin can be reached at babin@businessedge.ca)