Biogas News
Liberty’s Gilles Volpe talks Anaerobic Digestion & Renewables in NB
Renewable natural gas from organic materials produced by agriculture and food industries
Content borrowed from The role of natural gas and its future in New Brunswick - Insights with Don Mills and David Campbell- An Acadia Broadcasting Podcast | Podcast on Spotify.
Gilles Volpé, President of NB Gas with Liberty Utilities joined Don Mills and David Campbell on their podcast in January. Liberty Utilities is the natural gas distribution company in NB.
Gilles provides an important tutorial on the sources and uses of natural gas now and into the future. On an energy equivalent basis, NB currently uses as much natural gas as it does electricity.
Most large industrial companies across the province use it. In southern NB, almost all hospitals, schools, government buildings and other big commercial organizations heat with gas.
A considerable amount of electricity is already produced using natural gas and NB Power is building a new gas-fired generation facility in the Moncton region.
Where does the gas come from? Unfortunately, mostly from Alberta and the southern United States. In many cases it costs more to transport the gas thousands of kilometres than the cost of the gas itself. They talk about the potential to green the gas system in the years ahead through renewable sources and other topics.
Quoting Gilles....
“…Our main competitor [NB Power] says that it needs natural gas to be able to produce all the energy it's going to require to balance out the renewables, and displace dirtier fuel being used in other plants to help support shutting off coal [Belledune for example] over the next several years.
Gas is going to be around for decades and decades and the type of gas is going to evolve. It's going to become cleaner and greener as we move on with renewable natural gas and hydrogen. So much like the electric grid has been greening itself for 20 years, the gas grid is starting to green itself as well…. Why would you shut down gas if it's green and more reliable and less expensive?
I'm simplifying things, but you basically click a switch, it'll be up within a minute or so and you'll be generating lots of electricity that way, when you need it, like when those wind farms don't spin, and when the sun's not shining, you need a backup system. And gas systems are really quick to turn on and off and adapt to the load that's required on the system.
We are buying, developing, and investing in greener types of gas. And one of the types of gas that we're spending a lot of money and time on is renewable natural gas. The renewable natural gas comes from waste, rotting things, and it emits a gas [methane] that you capture and you process it a little bit and it turns into pipeline quality gas and we inject that into our system. Landfills are places where you can capture methane. Another big one is dairy farms where you capture all that manure, bring it to a digester that captures all the gas and you process it a little bit, then you inject it into your gas system. We're doing that right now in Upstate New York. We have four different plants where we are injecting renewable natural gas [made] from large dairy farms. There's so much [RNG being produced] that we inject enough renewable natural gas into our system in the summertime to cover the whole demand, that's how much progress we've made over the last five years. We only started this project five years ago. If you don't capture that methane, it releases the atmosphere. It's extremely bad for the environment. Worse emissions than natural gas, almost as bad as coal as far as the emissions of methane in the atmosphere.
It's a way to green your grid, because otherwise that methane [from untreated livestock manure] will take over the atmosphere is going to be very damaging. You capture it and you put it in a system where it's going to be put to good use.
I think the future is very, very bright. I think we [NB] have a really good electricity system. We have an excellent natural gas distribution system. We have large institutional users of this energy, and large industrial users of energy. And we're well positioned because not every province has a gas distribution system, not every state has a gas distribution system, not every country in Europe has gas distribution systems, but we happen to have all these elements here.
I'm part of a group of people in the energy business [who formed the] New Brunswick Energy Cluster just a couple weeks ago. We're trying to harness the economic development opportunities with the advantages that the energy system that we have here.
I think we have a great opportunity to be able to do R&D in New Brunswick, as well as innovate and put solutions together in the end that are cost effective and reliable for our customers.