Canadian startup puts SHOC spin on waste-to-biofuel process

Canada’s Innoventé says it has a way to take pig manure and municipal sewage and efficiently turn it into a bio-energy product that could change where the Saint-Patrice-de-Beaurivage region of Quebec gets some of its electricity.

Innoventé CEO Richard Painchaud told the Cleantech Group today his company is putting a new twist on a defunct company, aided by a recent infusion of funding from the government-backed Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC). The microbiologist and major shareholder in Innoventé launched the company in 2005 and has exclusively licensed technology from the bankrupt Envirogain.

Envirogain had been involved in a joint venture with the nonprofit Research and Development Institute for the Agri-Environment to develop wastewater treatment technologies for the agricultural, agro-industrial, industrial or municipal sectors.

Under the joint venture, the two were able to biodry pig manure to produce fertilizer on a pilot and industrial scale, demonstrating the technology, Painchaud said. When the company went bankrupt, Innoventé decided to apply the technology to produce biofuel.

Envirogain had already received $5 million from SDTC, which finances and supports developing clean technologies that offer economic, environmental and health benefits to Canadians (see SDTC backs 18 Canadian cleantech startups and SDTC calls for applications to $500M biofuel fund). SDTC, which operates two funds, said last week it’s providing $2.7 million to Innoventé to pick up where Envirogain left off.

“We want to finish the project with Envirogain,” Painchaud said. “But we want to add another phase, which would be a bigger phase.”

Innoventé is working to treat biosolids from wastewater treatment and industrial plants to produce a pellet-like bioproduct it says is high in energy content and can be used as a substitute for fossil fuels in industrial processes and power production, including at pulp and paper mills and slaughterhouses, or be used as a soil nutrient.

Innoventé and its partners plan to further develop and demonstrate what it calls SHOC (drying and sanitization by controlled oxidation) technology—a drying process used to transform organic residues such as manures, municipal sewage, food processing wastes and pulp and paper mill sludges into the pellets it calls BioEnergy From Organic Residues (BEFOR).

BEFOR is a dry, odorless product with a high calorific value, which is considered to be ideal as a renewable energy source in places such as cogeneration plants, according to Innoventé. Most organic residues have to be dried to have value for energy applications. The bioproduct has a value of about $100 per ton, Painchaud said.

The two-step process includes putting the biosolids into biodryers, which evaporate the water, bringing it to about 50 percent dry matter, followed by another dryer than brings it to 70 percent dry matter, Painchaud said. The second step uses heat recovered from the biodryer and energy generated by a solar wall to finish drying the granular biomass and to produce the bio-energy material, making it a more energy efficient process, Painchaud said.

SHOC technology uses up to six times less energy than conventional drying methods, according to Innoventé. Painchaud added the company has also estimated using one ton of the pellets helps to save about one ton of greenhouse gases.

Other companies such as Israeli commodities recycler Applied CleanTech (ACT) developed technology to recycle liquid municipal waste. And with a new partnership with Amherst, Mass.-based startup Qteros, the two are now looking to making ethanol from liquid municipal waste (see Qteros teams with Israel's ACT on sludge-to-fuel process).

Innoventé purchased a plant, built in 2000, in Saint-Patrice-de-Beaurivage, Quebec, capable of generating the pellets at commercial scale. The site already has a dryer because it was previously used to dry manure.

Quebec-based pulp and paper mill company Kruger, which also develops wind farms, has indicated it plans to purchase as much of the bio-product that Innoventé can produce for its 25 megawatt cogeneration plant.

Innoventé has raised more than $8.3 million to date to continue to establish the technology and build out the Saint-Patrice-de-Beaurivage plant. The funding has come from SDTC, private partners, and $3 million from the government of Quebec’s Agence de l’efficacité énergétique through its Technoclimat program.

Painchaud expects the plant to be operating by next fall, and in full operation come 2011. It is expected to process 50,000 tons a year of biosolids from wastewater treatment and industrial plants, producing 25,000 tons of pellets. He said the market exists for more than 100 similar plants to be build in Quebec alone.

Innoventé is looking to go public in the next six months on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) or the TSX Exchange Venture Exchange, where Painchaud said it could raise about $25 million (see IPO drought? Cleantech companies flood Canadian markets).

"We want to use some of the money so we can add a second phase, building a cogeneration plant," Painchaud said.

The company is looking to use about $15 million from its IPO to build a cogeneration plant at the Saint-Patrice-de-Beaurivage site. Instead of selling its pellets to a partner like Kruger, Painchaud said the cogeneration plant would produce about 5 MW of electricity that would be sold to the surrounding area, which has a population of about 10,000.

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