The Regional District of Nanaimo’s board has approved $766,000 spending to fix flare at Greater Nanaimo Pollution Control Centre.
RDN directors, at their April 25 meeting, awarded a contract to CanWest Mechanical Ltd. to upgrade a biogas system at the Hammond Bay Road waste treatment facility. It utilizes three “digesters which continuously generate biogas, a process heating boiler which consumes biogas, and a flare which burns the excess gas” at the centre, noted a staff report.
The biogas flare system, built in 1997, and a recirculation system are aging and in need of replacement, the report said, and the use of a gas contractor specializing in this work is needed. Further, the recirculation system blowers will need to be moved to new outdoor location for safety purposes.
Sean De Pol, RDN director of water and wastewater, said as part of the biogas system, solids get separated from liquids and go through a digester.
“It … breaks down the organics in the absence of oxygen, similar to our stomachs,” said De Pol. “They operate very similar; similar bacteria, similar temperature. A byproduct of that breakdown is biogas, the important aspect of it is methane, which we burn in a variety of different ways.”
Gas is captured for co-generation to produce electricity and heat “and then we have, finally, the flare, so it’s networked throughout the system,” he said.
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Future growth and increased wastewater will be taken into account with upgrades, stated the report, and De Pol said the RDN has guidelines to determine this.
“We typically work on about a 25 to 30 per cent increase. We don’t want to overdesign … most things you’re trying to upgrade and expand stuff with a 15- to 20-year horizon and then that’s sort of the rule of thumb that we that we work with,” said De Pol.
Work is scheduled to begin in May, with completion by the end of the year, staff noted in the report.
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