Himark signs $15-million biogas deal

Edmonton-based firm will produce ethanol from manure in Kansas

Edmonton-based Himark BioGas, which designed and built its first bio-gas plant near Vegreville, has signed a deal worth $15 million with Western Plains Energy of Oakley, Kan.

The U.S. facility already produces ethanol from grain and corn. It will add Himark's patented Waste-to-Energy system to produce ethanol from manure from local feedlots, as well as food and human waste.

"This is our first licence, and the plant will be the largest on-farm biogas producer, representing 10 per cent of total U.S. production," said Evan Chrapko, the co-chief executive of Himark, formerly Highmark Renewables.

About half the $15 million is for a licence payment, with the rest for additional engineering and design that will be done by Himark to adapt the unit to the Kansas plant. The Himark digester at the Western Plains plant will initially have a capacity of 24 million litres per year.

The U.S. has 160 plants which produce about 50 billion litres a year of ethanol from grains. With that many potential customers, Chrapko sees a bright future for his technology.

"There won't be a satisfactory waste source near all of these, but many are near large cities where they could use sewage, or waste from feed lots, slaughterhouses, cheese-producing plants, or facilities which process fruit or alcohol," he said.

Byproducts from all of these can be used by the Himark system.

And the energy efficiency of using waste for energy is huge.

Ethanol has an efficiency ratio of 1 to 1.1 - it takes one unit of fossil fuel to produce 1.1 units of ethanol when all the energy used to produce the grain is added in.

"We are 7.4 to 1. To put that in context, the new energy darling of cellulose - wheat straw, forest slash - is between three and five. At the other end, the Alberta oilsands at 0.8 to 1," he said.

Himark's Grow-Gen operation in Hairy Hill near Vegreville also plans to produce ethanol when it opens its second phase next fall.

"We are using the same company that built the Western Plains ethanol plant, in fact they built about two-thirds of all the U.S. plants. So while we are adding ethanol to our biogas plant, in Kansas they are adding biogas to their ethanol plant," said Chrapko.

"So there will be a bit of a competition to see who gets the integrated bio-refinery first," he said jokingly.

Himark's more than 100 patents are part of a family of inventions known as IMUS (Integrated Bio-mass Utilization System). While the original facility used manure from a nearby feedlot to create biogas, the expansion will convert organic wastes and non-food grade wheat into green electricity, bio-fertilizer and ethanol fuel.

Grow-Gen is also at the centre of the new BioWaste to Energy for Canada Integration Initiative Corp. (BECii), which is establishing a centre involving seven other firms which plan to jointly test and demonstrate projects that can be developed for the marketplace.

Chrapko's firm has made a video of the Himark technology in 18 languages, because that's how wide the interest is and how great the need is in the world to turn sewage and animal waste into energy, he said.

This week he is off to Dubai, where he is planning an even larger project than the Kansas plant that will tap into the dairy industry in the Middle East nation.

He says Himark aims to be the world biogas leader within the next five years.

"When you think of power you think of GE, and when you think of biogas you will think of Himark," he said. "We want to be the GE of biogas, and we aren't shy about saying so."

source: edmontonjournal