Polynerd

This is renewable energy blog post 4 of 200

This is part 2 of a post going over the proposals shortlisted by the Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation. In case you've never heard of them, they're a new, not-for-profit corporation funded by Alberta's carbon tax. Their mandate is to achieve sustainable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and to assist in adapting to climate change. You can find the first post here. 

Effective Solvent Extraction Incorporating Electromagnetic Heating (ESEIEH)
ESEIEH constitutes a field demonstration pilot to evaluate the combination of electromagnetic heating for rapid horizontal well pair startup and sustained formation heating with concurrent injection of a solvent. The project incorporates staged yard-scale testing, numerical modeling studies and a small scale field trial. Greenhouse gas reductions potentially exceeding 80% over SAGD are projected, with cost efficiencies providing economic benefits capable of doubling Alberta’s bitumen reserves.

Another electromagnetic SAGD project. Another in a long line of oilsands projects. Another bummer that this has been shortlisted.

Swan Hills Waste Heat Recovery Power Project
Free Energy Power Corp has reached agreement with Devon Canada to produce 2.0 MW of electricity for their Swan Hills site whereby waste heat from production water is used to create power using advanced technology Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) units to drive a turbine. Recent technology advances allow the conversion of waste heat into green electric power without generating additional GHG emission in this demonstration project.

Waste heat recovery is the energy generation industry's next killer app (Their first one being coal). It's been ignored for too long.

Bio Coal in Canada
Canadian Bioenergy Corporation is working to manufacture a biomass-based, densified energy product that is fully fungible with coal. This ‘bio-coal’ will be produced from Alberta’s forestry and agricultural residues for direct co-firing in Alberta’s power generation and coal-based thermal facilities. Co-firing bio-coal offers one of the least cost, most efficient, and near term opportunities to abate substantial amounts of CO2e emissions.

This sounds awesome. Alberta is rich with pine-beetle wood and forestry and agricultural waste. Coal plants need to be retired but we need baseload electric generation while we switch to renewables. This provides a great transition technology and is a win-win for so many industries. This is a project that needs to be funded. Found this on wikipedia about bio-coal. A large potential stumbling block could be getting the utilities to burn this stuff.  - Torrefaction is a thermo chemical treatment of biomass at 200 to 320 °C. It is carried out under atmospheric conditions and in the absence of oxygen. During the process, the water contained in the biomass as well as superfluous volatiles are removed, and the biopolymers (cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin) partly decompose giving off various types of volatiles. The final product is the remaining solid, dry, blackened material which is referred to as “torrefied biomass” or “bio-coal”. 

Plasco Alberta Renewable Energy and Waste Conversion Project
Plasco Alberta will build, own and operate a Plasco Waste Conversion and Renewable Energy Facility in Red Deer County. This facility will receive, process and convert approximately 307 tonnes per day of municipal solid waste, annually create 107,570 MW of renewable baseload power transmitted directly into the local distribution network, and reduce 2.1 tonnes of CO2e per tonne of MSW processed.

This project looks like it's going ahead with or without the CCEMC. Check out this page. Agreements are in place with neighboring communities and the land has been set aside by Red Deer. I'm unfamiliar with their technology, which looks to be a mix of biogas, co-gen and plasma heat but it sounds cool.

Residential Renewable Energy
The program will provide Renewable Energy Systems to Alberta residences using solar and micro-wind technologies commencing in 2010. ENMAX plans to offer an equipment rental program to remove the capital cost hurdle allowing customers to reduce their household environmental footprint today. The program will be made available to all Alberta home-owners and will form the core of our renewable energy initiative. ENMAX will be responsible for all system development and delivery.

If you want an excellent deconstruction of Enmax's residential renewable energy plans you should read Chris Turner's article on it in Alberta Views magazine. I think Enmax is getting it right here. Large scale adoption of small scale energy generation is just the right idea.

Field Test of ET-DSP(TM) in the Mineable Athabasca Oil Sands
E-T Energy’s ET-DSP(TM) patented bitumen extraction process provides an environmentally friendly alternative for oil sands production for bitumen deposits within the depth range of 6 - 250 m below surface. The high thermal efficiency of the ET-DSP(TM) process results in dramatically lower GHG emissions per barrel of bitumen produced, when compared to established production methods such as mining and SAGD.

If you were curious, ET-DSP stands for Electro-Thermal Dynamic Stripping Process. If you want to learn more about E-T Energy's technology they have a video on their homepage. But yes, this is another oil sands project.

Landfill Gas Capture and Alternative Energy Demonstration Project
The Town of Redcliff and Cypress County and Versus Goliath Project Solutions Inc. wish to develop a biogas capture and beneficial use technology demonstration project at the waste disposal facility in the Town of Redcliff, Alberta.

Diverting solid waste from landfills and capturing the methane is win-win-win. A signifigant odour problem is solved, you divert thousands of tonnes of waste away from landfills, you generate cleaner energy and the outputs are high-quality fertilizer and water. These projects are an easy, simple way for cities and towns to diversify and green their energy supply.

Lethbridge Biogas/ Cogeneration Project
ECB & StormFisher have partnered to build a 3.2MW biogas facility in Lethbridge. On top of producing green, renewable electricity, the facility will provide a safe & sustainable disposal alternative to the agricultural & food processing industries, by processing up to 150,000t of livestock manure, food processing waste & animal by-products annually. Lastly, the facility’s throughput will be dried & pelletized & sold to the agricultural & commercial organic fertilizer markets.

StormFisher was just recently acquired by an American firm however it probably won't affect the bid as StormFisher only seems to be providing the anaerobic digesters. ECB has a pretty solid business idea, commercializing the waste from millions of animals in Feedlot Alley outside of Lethbridge. Co-gen is always a good idea as well.

Emerging Technologies for Emerging Times - Solar Electric Buildings and the Smart Grid
The project will integrate Photovoltaic (PV) into existing campus facilities and the monitoring and controlling of this electricity and the loads in the buildings on which it is located through the application of Smart-Grid concepts. The anticipated installed PV capacity will be 1 MW, generating approximately 1,200 MWh/year. The PV arrays will be installed and distributed on multiple building structures and tied in to the U of A electrical distribution system. Annual GHG reduction will be 800 MTeCO2.

I would venture a guess that the Solar Energy Society of Canada - Northern Alberta Chapter  (SESCI-NAC) is playing a part in this bid. A working laboratory on solar PV/smart grid  at the world class research facility that is the University of Alberta is a tremendous idea. Alberta has massive solar potential and as more renewable come online our grid needs to become signfigantly smarter. We need our brightest people working to figure out these problems. This idea should be approved.

Reduction of GHG emissions through green biofuel production and CO2 utilization: From pilot plant to commercialization.
The proposed project will leverage the biorefinery capabilities of the Advanced Energy Research Facility (AERF) to evaluate several biomass feedstocks for the production of synthetic biofuels utilizing the Enerkem synthetic gas (syngas) to alcohols process. In addition to establishing a performance baseline, the AERF team will evaluate an optimization technology, known as dry reforming, which converts CO2 to useable syngas and evaluate direct incorporation of CO2 into biofuel intermediates.

I'm not as high on biofeuls as some. We do have forests full of pine-beetle killed wood, taking advantage of those should be the priority of a project like this. The Alberta Research Council has a study out on the potential of Alberta's forests to provide the feedstock for these biofuels.

Conclusion

9 of the 30 shortlisted projects are related to the oilsands. Yikes. Figuring out more efficient ways to spin oil out of the sands is important to improving Alberta's terrible, terrible reputation around the world however, how this would achieve a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is beyond me given the rate of growth in that particular industry.

A large percentage of Alberta's greenhouse gases are produced by coal fired electric generation plants. Figuring out ways to green the grid should be the first priority.

Another big disappointment is the lack of any conservation or effciency proposals. Now, I don't know the makeup of the 223 different proposals that were submitted but if they want more bang for their $120 million they should be going for conversation and efficiency proposals rather than "roadmaps" and electro-magnetic SAGD ideas.

My favourites:

• Green Building Technologies Lab
• Enmax's small scale residential renewable energy program
• Lethbridge biogas/cogen project
• Bio-Coal
• Anything to do with waste heat
• Power Pod
• Solar/Smart grid lab at the U of A

If I was sitting on the board of the CCEMC, I'd kibosh anything to do with the oilsands or carbon capture and storage. Now, is that likely to happyn? I'm not familiar with the chair of the CCEMC, Eric Newell, but he is a former CEO of oil sands giant Syncrude. In fact, the makeup of the board is extremely puzzling (you can find all the board members and executive of the CCEMC here) with represenatives from the mineral manufacturing, fertilizer, chemical production and oil sands sectors as well as the former CEO of Canada's largest thermal coal company sitting on the board.

I hope you got something out of this exercise. I think the shortlisted proposals just need to exist on the web instead of being buried in a PDF. I'm extremely interested in how they divvy up their budget and will be keenly following all announcements coming from the CCEMC. If there's anything you think I need to know about in regards to these projects or the CCEMC in general, let me know in the comments.