The Alberta government will put up almost $508,000 toward feasibility studies for two livestock methane power plants as well as an ethanol plant expansion.
The province’s contributions, announced Wednesday, will come through its Biorefining Commercialization and Market Development program and Bio-energy Infrastructure Development program. The three contributions include:
- $300,000 for a study by Kingdom Farm Inc. of Bentley (northwest of Red Deer) to review the potential for applying biogas technology on large-scale Alberta hog farms such as its own, to generate methane for electricity and heating fuel;
- $157,800 to wheat processor Permolex, which makes ethanol, flour and gluten at Red Deer, to expand its storage capacity and distribution infrastructure there and study the feasibility of a 300 per cent capacity expansion (the company says it now processes about 110,000 tonnes of CPS wheat per year); and
- $50,000 to Highmark Renewables Research, for a feasibility study on the commercial-scale use of an integrated manure utilization system (IMUS), to process liquid manure on a large dairy farm near Ponoka and generate methane biogas, also for electricity and heating.
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The Highmark project, if it proceeds past the study stage, would be the first IMUS project in a dairy setting in the province. The company already generates up to 24,000 kWh of power per day from an anaerobic digestion system at a feedlot at Vegreville.
The provincial energy department noted in a release Wednesday that the three projects combined represent up to $108 million of new investment in the province.
