The possibility of Gold River opening its arms to Vancouver's trash doesn't faze the up-Island village's mayor, not after running the idea through a sniff test.
What Green Island Energy proposes to burn in its planned Gold River power plant is not raw garbage, but combustible waste that has been processed into bales of what amounts to "dryer fluff," says Craig Anderson. And that dryer fluff means upwards of 60 permanent, high-paying jobs in a community that hasn't had a lot to cheer about since its pulp mill closed in 1999. Anderson's comments come on the heels of the news that Green Island is among 23 outfits interested in disposing of Lower Mainland waste. Green Island, you may recall, was among 38 independent power projects awarded contracts by B.C. Hydro this summer. It plans to expand the power plant at the old Gold River pulp mill site, generating electricity that would be carried along existing transmission lines. It will be a biomass waste-to-energy plant, deemed environmentally friendly because it will mostly burn wood waste (which gives off greenhouse gases if left to rot) instead of fossil fuels. Some wood will come from Western Forest Products' new log-sorting operation at the old mill site, but most will be shipped in from up and down the Pacific coast -- from construction sites, furniture manufacturers, pine-beetle residue, land clearing ... "You name it on the wood side, if it has no commercial value, we can combust it," says Green Island spokesman Bruce Clark, on the phone from Vancouver. The plant will also use what's known as refuse-derived fuel -- garbage that has had the nasty bits and recyclables screened out, then been shredded, formed into pellets or cubes and compressed into three-tonne bales cloaked in shrink wrap. Like wood waste, the use of refuse-derived fuel is deemed environmentally neutral. "It's a processed fuel. It's not barges full of garbage," says Clark. "It's not like a garbage incinerator that burns television sets." Please banish from your mind any visions of open barges, heaped with mountains of oozing Vancouver garbage, ready to be shovelled into the gaping maw of a smoke-belching burner. "GIE assured us they will not be shipping raw garbage into Gold River," says Anderson. And state-of-the-art equipment should limit smokestack emissions. "It's about one fiftieth of what the pulp mill put out, and they don't have the smell." Not everyone is so sure Green Island is all that green. "We're from Missouri," says Peter Ronald, provincial co-ordinator of the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association. Biomass may not be dirty like coal, but what about wind power and other alternatives? Incremental efficiencies don't mean much when put in the broader energy-consumption context, he says. "We've got to get off this accelerating curve of more, more, more." But Green Island maintains it offers an environmentally preferable alternative -- and keeping that status is to the company's advantage, says Clark. B.C. Hydro pays more for clean power, and Green Island anticipates being able to convert environmental certification into profits in other ways, too. Clark is one of a number of Canadian and American shareholders in Green Island. So is the pop singer Jewel, who posed for a photo-op with Premier Gordon Campbell when the Gold River proposal was made public in 2003. Jewel is less involved than she was, says Clark, but is still an investor, along with her mother, through their holding company Alternative Energy Group. Another equity partner will be named within a couple of months. "We're thinking we may be able to break ground by early next year," says Clark. The Hydro contract says the plant must be open by September 2009, but Clark says it could be complete as early as the summer of 2008. It will be a while before it is decided whether Green Island will get any fuel derived from Lower Mainland garbage. The Greater Vancouver Regional District is looking for a way to dispose of trash that currently gets trucked to a Cache Creek landfill that is due to close in 2010. A GVRD request for expressions of interest elicited 23 replies this summer, including the one from Green Island. Sending clean waste to Gold River would cost the GVRD $30 a tonne, says Clark. "The critical part is preparing it to our standards." All this is happening against a backdrop that has seen a variety of mostly rural communities across North America rebel at the notion of being used as dumping grounds for big-city waste. Mayor Anderson acknowledges that not everyone is thrilled with the optics of Gold River dealing with trash from the Big Smoke, even if it's just in the form of relatively clean fuel. He sees a touch of irony, though, in that Gold River itself sends its trash elsewhere: "Our garbage goes to Campbell River." _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
