History in the making

For the last several years, all eyes in the waste management industry have been closely watching the Enerkem Alberta Biofuels project in Canada. And for good reason: The project is considered the world’s first major collaboration between a large city and a waste-to-biofuels producer to turn municipal solid waste (MSW) into biofuels and renewable chemicals. If this project is successful and profitable, then production of biofuels from waste could become an integral component of integrated waste management projects all over the world.

The Enerkem Alberta Biofuels project, a collaboration between the Montreal-based technology firm, Enerkem; the city of Edmonton, Alberta; and Alberta Innovates – Energy and Environment Solutions, achieved a critical milestone recently. Enerkem Cofounder, President and CEO Vincent Chornet says the facility “is a result of more than 10 years of efforts to scale up Enerkem’s technology from pilot and demonstration to full commercial scale.”

Those efforts paid off during the summer of 2015 when Enerkem Alberta Biofuels initiated biomethanol production at commercial scale. “This is a pivotal milestone for Enerkem, and we believe that this world-class facility could transform the global waste industry,” says Chornet.
 

Small steps

Enerkem’s technology uses garbage instead of petroleum for the production of liquid transportation fuels and renewable chemicals.

Chornet’s father Esteban, a professor emeritus at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, conceived the idea for the Enerkem technology while observing his father using wood waste from his saw mill to make electricity in the late 1930s in Mallorca, Spain. Years later, Chornet and his father saw the opportunity to develop and bring the technology to market.

The process converts nonrecyclable MSW into methanol, ethanol and other widely used chemical intermediates. “Our modular facilities can be replicated anywhere in the world as a competitive and sustainable alternative to incineration and landfilling,” Chornet says.

Chornet says Enerkem is the first company in the world to have successfully produced biomethanol from MSW at a commercial scale, but the road to that achievement was not speedy. Enerkem took its time to carefully scale up its technology. “A whole series of breakthroughs—albeit more modest—had to be achieved since the construction of our first pilot plant in Sherbrooke in the early 2000s which step-by-step allowed us to produce methanol from waste in a full-scale commercial plant.”

Chornet says Enerkem owes its success in scaling up its technology to “the rigorous approach we adopted and our strong team. We carefully followed each step while scaling up from pilot to demonstration to commercial scale.”

In addition to the Edmonton facility, Enerkem owns a demonstration plant and a pilot facility in Quebec. “In 2011, we successfully produced the first liter of methanol at demonstration scale. We began producing ethanol from waste at our demonstration facility in Westbury back in 2012.”

Chornet notes the biggest challenges facing any clean-tech company are financing the scale-up plan and building the first-of-kind commercial facility. “Many of our efforts therefore went into raising the capital required to take our breakthrough industrial innovation from lab to commercial stage,” he says.

According to Chornet, Enerkem has a strong investor base committed to the company’s success and commercial growth. Through September of 2015, the company had raised over C$400 million, including C$152.6 of financing secured that month.

“I must say a huge thank you to our financial partners, employees, as well as the City of Edmonton and Alberta Innovates—Energy and Environment Solutions who believed in us and have accompanied us while we were reaching this pivotal operational milestone,” Chornet said when making the announcement about both the additional financing and the commercial production of biomethanol in September. “We are about to fundamentally transform the waste industry over the coming years and allow energy and chemical groups access to a new and competitive source of renewable carbon.”
 

Feeding the system

Edmonton Alberta Biofuels’ feedstock arrives in garbage trucks to the Edmonton Waste Management Centre. The garbage is dumped onto a tipping floor then moved onto a set of conveyors and equipment that remove wet organics which are sent for composting. Recyclables have already been removed from the waste by residents prior to collection. The remaining nonrecyclable, noncompostable waste then goes through equipment—designed, engineered and constructed by Vecoplan LLC, Archdale, North Carolina—that prepares it for the Enerkem process. (More about the turnkey refuse-derived fuel processing system is available in the July/August 2013 Renewable Energy from Waste cover story, “Full service,” available at www.rewmag.com/article/rew0813-full-service.)

First, the waste material is shredded to facilitate handing and further separation, explains Chornet. “We then separate out ferrous metals as well as dusty and heavy materials from the waste. Nonferrous metal such as aluminum is removed and recycled toward the end of the process.”

The last step is a secondary shredder that adjusts the particle size of the material to facilitate flow and handling properties of the waste.

“At this point,” says Chornet, “We refer to the waste material as garbage fluff. This fluff is then conveyed to Enerkem’s feedstock storage building where it is fed into the Enerkem process and converted to methanol and to ethanol.”

At full capacity, Enerkem Alberta Biofuels will process 100,000 dry metric tons of MSW per year. Chornet says, “We are currently adding equipment to maximize methanol capacity and halted production during this period.”

The additions are twofold, says Chornet. The first equipment addition will optimize methanol production and the second installation will be a module to allow the methanol to be converted to ethanol. Enerkem’s proprietary process is to first produce syngas, then methanol, then ethanol or other renewable chemicals. Chornet describes methanol as a chemical building block for the production of secondary chemicals such as olefins, acrylic acid, n-Propanol and n-Butanol, “which can then be used to form thousands of everyday products.”

“At the end of the year, we plan to be producing biomethanol from the city’s household garbage for which we have a 25-year feedstock agreement. Construction of an additional module converting our biomethanol into advanced ethanol will be completed within a year,” Chornet says. He adds that the facility is expected to be operating at full capacity by mid-2016 with ethanol production expected to start in the second half of 2016. When at full capacity, the Enerkem Alberta Biofuels facility will produce up to 38 million liters of ethanol.
 

MSW advantages

Enerkem’s proprietary technology chemically recycles the carbon molecules in nonrecyclable waste. In less than five minutes, the process converts these carbon molecules into a pure synthesis gas (also called syngas), which is then turned into biofuels and chemicals using commercially available catalysts. According to Chornet, the technology requires relatively low temperatures and pressures, which reduces energy requirements and costs.

Chornet points to several advantages of using MSW as a feedstock for the production of biofuels, including:

• it does not compete with the food supply;
• it does not have land use impact;
• it is already collected via existing collection distribution and logistics infrastructure; and
• it is an abundant feedstock available in both rural and urban areas.

“We have a strong business model, a game-changing technology, the support of our investors and the market potential is huge,” says Chornet.

According to Chornet, interest in Enerkem’s technology exists all over the world. “We want to be a world-scale biofuels and biochemical producer and we are currently developing a number of facilities, based on our standard modular design, in North America and abroad with several MOUs (memorandums of understanding) in place in EU and China.” He adds, ‘The issues addressed by our technology exist anywhere around the world.”

 

The author is editor of Renewable Energy from Waste and can be reached at ksmith@gie.net.