CATCH Articles:
Sludge incinerator may never be built
Mar 08, 2010
It won environmental approval more than two years ago, and has been pursued in Hamilton since at least 2004, but the proposed Liberty Energy sludge incinerator hasn’t started construction and may never happen. The sticking point appears to be the city’s plans to burn their own fecal material rather than pay a private operator to do it.
In February 2008, Liberty convinced the Ontario Ministry of the Environment to approve its proposal to incinerate 340,000 tonnes a year of sewage sludge using a gasification process at its 675 Strathearne Avenue property. For the company, it was an apparently successful end to a nearly three-year battle that saw environmental groups, scientists and even city council challenge the re-introduction of incineration to a city that had shut down its SWARU municipal facility in 2002.
The environmental assessment okay, and the subsequent issuance of an operating certificate by the ministry in September 2008, appeared to clear the way for the California-based company to proceed with its $120 million facility that also promised production of up to 10 megawatts of electricity. But the only physical evidence of this today is a “future home of Liberty Energy” sign attached to a decrepit building on the former USARCO site on Strathearne.
Liberty’s plans depend on several cities agreeing to pay the company to haul away their sludge – a process the company estimated could require 28,000 truckloads a year. Toronto has already made clear they won’t be one of them, and Hamilton’s water and wastewater staff are proposing to build their own, much smaller, incinerator to deal with this city’s annual sludge accumulation of 53,000 tonnes.
Liberty is pushing hard to derail that plan which completed the public portion of its environmental assessment process last summer and now awaits a ministry decision. The latest move came last Monday at the public works committee when Dundas councillor Russ Powers pressed wastewater director Jim Harnum on the timeline for a report comparing the costs of the city paying Liberty or financing its own incinerator.
At the end of the meeting where councillors can ask questions not related to the agenda, Powers asked for “an update on Liberty Energy, the peer review and the on-going saga”. Harnum’s response shed light on the situation.
“We have, as directed by committee and council, fast-tracked the review with Liberty,” he explained. “We’ve had a consultant that both ourselves and Liberty have agreed on [who’ve] come into to Hamilton and did about a four day workshop with the various members – both ourselves, our consultants on the biosolids master plan, and several staff, and representatives from Liberty. We have a good understanding of their business plan now, and we’re working on comparing that, and ‘levelizing’ it – we call – so that we can compare the city’s plan to the actual Liberty plan.”
Harnum promised a full report to the committee at either its March 22 meeting or in early April, but noted that it is a “very complicated business plan and [a] very complicated issue to try and hammer out.”
Powers question may have been spurred by the presence of Liberty president Wilson Nolan in the meeting and former MPP Trevor Pettit, one of several people the company has hired over the years to lobby for its project including former MOE staff. Pettit was the representative for Hamilton Mountain for one term in the Mike Harris conservative government in Ontario.
The city sludge incinerator was proposed in 2007 while the Liberty one was still tied up in the environmental assessment process. But a staff recommendation last fall to move to “detailed design and implementation” was derailed and replaced with the demand that staff present “comparisons with other proponents which may have an interest in this issue” – an obvious reference to Liberty.
The Liberty proposal has been generating controversy and division at council since a 2005 rezoning application for the Strathearne site passed by a 6-5 vote. Councillors have also condemned the 2008 approval and explored whether the city could charge a tipping fee for sludge brought to the Liberty plant from other cities.
Sludge incineration proposals by the company in its home base of California – whose alleged approval Liberty officials cited as proof of environmental acceptability when they first proposed the Hamilton facility – appear to have also not moved ahead.