City won’t pump more money into biodiesel processor

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This article was published 26/12/2010 (5494 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The City of Brandon is saying goodbye to its biodiesel processor.

Getting the proper licensing from the province’s Department of Labour to run the processor has proved too expensive and time-consuming, says the city’s director of operational services, Rod Sage.

The city hopes to sell the contraption and recoup its $50,000 investment.

“It was built in Rapid City by Celtic Power and Machining and they commissioned it out there and everything was running good,” Sage said.

“We brought it in here (to the Eastview landfill) and in order for us, the city, to hook everything up, we’re now faced with a few obstacles that we weren’t aware of.”

At least another $50,000 would be needed just to secure designs and then seek the proper licensing.

Sage said it’s hard to justify spending that much when the city doesn’t even know if it will get provincial approval to run the processor.

“There may be additional changes in the design, there may be additional drawings required … to go back and spend $50,000 on something that may or may not pan out, I’m not prepared to keep putting money into a project that may not work,” he said.

Another problem the city has run into is the fact that there is no immediate use for the refined fuel.

With the city’s only “french fry” bus written off in an electrical fire last summer and most of the other suitable pieces of landfill machinery and the city’s new fleet of transit buses still on warranty, the city has been left scratching its head on what it would do with the end product.

“We’re not about to use a biofuel product in a brand new engine that may compromise the warranty,” Sage said.

For the few dozen restaurants that had been participating in the city’s free used cooking oil pickup program that would have essentially provided the raw product for the processor, the city has put them in touch with a couple of alternative pickup companies.

Ryan Kiesman, owner of Winnipeg-based Grease Man Jack, has been working with the city for the past several months to get rid of the stockpile of oil that it has not been able to process.

He has now committed to taking on the free pickup of used cooking oil for those restaurants that were part of the program.

“I refine it and process it and it’s going into animal feed,” Kiesman explained. “I sell my product back farmers.”

A similar Winnipeg business, Recycoil, is also available for the same service.

As for the city’s aborted attempt to produce its own biofuel, Sage doesn’t look at it as a failure.

He said the city is still looking to use biodiesel somewhere in Brandon.

“It’s cost-prohibitive to for us to continue (production) down the road, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the city will not continue other biodiesel options as a whole,” he said. “For example, the City of Calgary uses a blended biofuel in some of their vehicles out there … those are some things we could look at. We might not necessarily now be in the business of producing the fuel, but we would definitely be looking at options.”