¦PROJECT DEVELOPMENT
PHOTO: ROS ROCA GROUP
W
hile project developers in the U.S. and Canada work diligently to get their first biogas plants financed and permitted, Spanish-owned Ros Roca Group recently commissioned the largest food waste-to-power plant in Europe. The 5-megawatt (MW) facility is now operating and will take in about 120,000 tons of a mixture of solid and liquid commercial food waste every year from supermarkets, restaurants and food processing plants. Over its lifetime, it will use 2 million tons of waste, according to Ian Handley, vice president of Ros Roca’s U.S. division. The plant was constructed for the largest waste management contractor in the U.K., Biffa Waste Services, which also built one of the first industrial-scale anaerobic digestion (AD) plants in the country. Ros Roca's origins are in the manufacture of garbage trucks, which eventually led the company to enter the waste treatment market. Because food organics are typically heavily contaminated—up to 15 percent— the plant employs a sophisticated pretreatment process ahead of the AD, which involves crushing the material and then dumping it into a mixing tank to introduce water. “It’s then put through a screening process to strip out what we call the light fractions or plastics, and then into a grit trap to take out the heavy fractions,” Handley explains. “A lot of the smart stuff is actually done on the front-end, in preparation for insertion into the digester.” The plant is in an urban area on the site of an existing landfill, and disproves the common assumption that these types of AD facilities must be sited far away from people and other businesses. “There’s a lot of misconception in the marketplace that these plants, because of odors, need to be well-removed from residential areas,” Handley says. “That’s not true, as today’s odor controls allow them to be built quite close.” The landfill site is within 200 meters (656 feet) of a prime retail development area, he adds. “Using this model, we’re try-
WASTE-TO-ENERGY EXPERTS: Ros Roca has built 25 anaerobic digestion plants in Europe and will be building a 180,000-ton plant in India.
ing to illustrate what’s possible in the U.S.; that you don’t have to have something that’s 50 or 60 miles away from a metropolitan area. You can build very close to the source of the feedstock.” In the past eight years, Ros Roca has built 25 of these AD plants throughout Europe, and was recently contracted to build a 180,000-ton plant in India. Handley says while things are beginning to move in the U.S., it’s at a much slower pace, and development is mostly in states where it is incentivized.
Project Challenges From Handley’s perspective, a country’s energy incentives play the most significant role in successfully implementing industrialscale AD projects. While Europe’s incentives are enticing, the U.S. in general offers little.
22 BIOMASS POWER & THERMAL | AUGUST 2011
“We actually see more scope [in the U.S.] for slightly smaller plants—about 50,000 tons—that use the biogas for gas injection into the grid or to produce biomethane to fuel vehicles. That’s because electricity here is so cheap,” Handley says. Daniel Rickenmann, CEO of W2E Organic Power, says the biggest hurdle in developing its project in South Carolina was determining where it fit in current regulations. “Since we are really the first digester [of this kind] in the state, it’s a new concept,” he says. “We’re taking in solid waste, but also composting and recycling. Fitting under just recycling would speed up the permitting process, but when you’re bringing in food-related solid waste there are a lot more regulations.” Anand Gangadharan, CEO of Novi Energy, which is developing a 3-MW com-