Bio-En Power Inc.
Bio-En Power: many years ago, we decided to design, build, and operate our own large-scale biogas plant, using our own technology, and our own money. And since it was commissioned, we’ve used that facility to constantly test out new types of equipment, organic feedstocks, and operating protocols. There’s nothing that sharpens your instincts and understanding of your business more than having to operate a large-scale production facility day in and day out, all while keeping your feedstock, energy and digestate customers absolutely happy, and while keeping the business profitable.
Company details
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- Business Type:
- Manufacturer
- Industry Type:
- Bioenergy
- Market Focus:
- Internationally (various countries)
- Year Founded:
- 2005
About Us
We believe that this gives us unique and powerful insights into what really works and really makes sense in the challenging world of turning complex organic wastes into renewable energy. We really know the biogas business.
Interested?
We can build you a plant anywhere. We have commissioned 345,000 annual tonnes of waste-processing capacity and more than 9 MW of electrical generating capacity to date. Anaerobic Digestion will be a great fit, any time you have large quantities of organic waste to process, and a market for the energy you will produce.
We Produce Green Energy
The capital cost to build an anaerobic digestion plant like this is the same as the cost to build a comparable composting plant. But the operating costs of the digestion plant will be a fraction of what composting costs.
What makes anaerobic digestion different is that it always produces large quantities of green, renewable energy from the wastes. Valuable energy. Energy revenue makes all the difference.
No composting technology can compete.
Seacliff Energy
Our first plant in Canada was built for Seacliff Energy, in Leamington, Ontario. This photo shows the Seacliff plant, with the digester facility visible to the rear, and a large hydroponic greenhouse complex in the foreground. Biogas from the digester is used to produce electricity for sale to the local utility. Waste heat produced by the generator is enough to substantially heat the greenhouse complex in the foreground, through the Canadian winter.
Really.
Organic wastes mean odour. The composting industry has worked hard to develop solutions for the odour problem, but even the best, state-of-the-art composting facilities universally experience at least occasional odour complaints. It's an inherent problem with that technology.
Want to build a new composting facility? You'll need lots of land and lots of distance from neighbours. And you'll still likely have at least some odour complaints. That's just the reality of composting.
Build an anaerobic digestion plant to process your organics, and you'll never have to even think about odours again.
Think of us as being just like a compost plant, but without the odour problems.
We can build you a plant like this, but if you'd like, we'd also be happy to operate it for you. Our own, European-certified plant operators know how to get the very best out of our technology, day in and day out.
Our plant operators know how to absolutely maximize green energy production. It makes all the difference.
Take Advantage of a Wide Range of Waste Types
This is a photo of solid waste, already inside the receiving pit at one of our plants. It's off-spec retail food products, still in the original cans, cardboard cases and shrink wrap. This will give you some idea of how powerful and effective our pre-processing system is--it allows us to routinely accept and process loads that no composting facility would consider. We fully remove the inorganic impurities first, and then make energy from what's left.
Anaerobic Digesters Thrive on Many Different Wastes
When making energy, we refer to the types of waste that we receive as feedstocks. Anaerobic digesters can work with an incredibly-wide range of different feedstocks--virtually any type of organic material can be an effective food source for the bacteria that make their home in our digesters. A brief summary of some of the major feedstock categories follows. If you think you have quantities of an unusual waste stream that might work, please just ask us--we'll either already know about that waste, or can undertake some simple lab analyses to determine its potential. Never forget the remarkable flexibility of digesters. There's no reason why a single facility can't be used to simultaneously process multiple categories of feedstocks from the descriptions below.
MUNICIPAL WASTESIncreasingly, municipalities in Europe and North America are collecting food wastes as part of their systems to divert wastes away from landfill. Commonly referred to as Source-Separated Organics (SSO), this type of waste is an ideal digester feedstock. SSO has been a profound challenge for the composting industry, given its potential to create odour and problems with inorganic impurities such as plastic. A well-designed digestion facility will not produce any off-site odours, and is much better at deftly separating out plastic and other materials than any composting facility can be. The potential for energy revenue also means that digesters are much cheaper to operate than composting facilities. Anaerobic digestion is increasingly the obvious first choice for municipal SSO.
FOOD INDUSTRY LIQUIDS AND SOLIDS
The food processing industry is large and diverse. (Great feedstocks come from the industries that produce food for both human and animal consumption). Virtually any type of waste produced by the food-processing sector makes a great feedstock for your digester. In particular, this includes liquid wastes--fats, oils and greases, wastes produced by on-site, food-industry wastewater treatment plants, and wash waters. Most of these materials contain energy in one form or another that can be used by a digester. More importantly, liquid wastes of this type can supplement or even replace the water supply that digesters need to operate. We try to incorporate liquid wastes into our designs whenever we can.
A WIDE RANGE OF FARM WASTES
Many on-farm digesters are built around the processing of manures, especially from the dairy and beef industries. But a wide range of other wastes that may be generated on the farm can also be utilized, including spoiled feed, crop residues, and other housekeeping wastes.
SEWAGE SLUDGES AND SEPTAGE
There is a long history in North America of using anaerobic digesters to process and stabilize organic sludges that are produced by the operation of municipal wastewater treatment plants. Increasingly, opportunities are being exploited to add other materials, such as food waste and fats, to existing municipal sewage facilities, to significantly boost their energy production. This is something we can do for you.
ENERGY CROPS
Much of the European digester industry has been created to process energy crops--field crops that are grown and harvested expressly as a feedstock for energy production in a digester. Energy crops can also be considered as a supplement to bring more feedstock to an existing digester that was built primarily to process other types of waste.
No-Hassle End Product Marketing
This is a field of oats. The part of the field on the right side of this photo received one application Bio-En Green Organic, the fertilizer produced by our digesters. The part of the field on the left didn't. It's an amazing crop response.
We offer a full-service nutrient management program for our fertilizer customers. We are able to both deliver and directly apply nutrients at agronomic rates to your fields.
Organic waste gets processed in our digestion facilities. As a result of that processing, we strip much of the carbon out of that waste, and turn it into green energy. But most of the nutrients and organic matter that were in the original wastes are left behind, and come out the back of our facilities as a rich, commercial organic fertilizer. The fertilizer we produce is licensed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. It is not a regulated waste material, and requires no special handling.
Composting facilities produce compost. Recent history shows that when composting facilities are used to process source-separated curbside organics (SSO) as a feedstock, it can be almost impossible for them to meet prevailing regulatory standards for unrestricted compost quality. Too often, there are too many small pieces of plastic, glass, and other contaminants still in the compost to meet those high standards.
But we routinely test our fertilizer against those same standards, and have no difficulty meeting them, even though we don't need to when our market is always agricultural fertilizer. Still, we do the testing anyway, because we want to be sure that our fertilizer is really clean. We're able to achieve this because our pre-processing technology does an amazing job of removing all of those inorganic contaminants, before the waste even gets into our digesters.
In Canada, our fertilizer routinely meets the heavy metal, pathogen, and foreign matter standards for unrestricted use (as compost) found in the Federal BNQ standards, as well as the equivalent standards of every Canadian Province. Easily. It's an incredibly clean, pure product. We aren't aware of any other technology vendor capable of matching what we have accomplished.
Marketing our fertilizer to the agricultural sector as a liquid material is a really effective and simple way to manage this material. We generally don't recommend de-watering or composting the material (as some do), because this is costly and unnecessary. But our proven ability to produce such a contaminant-free product means that if you do want to de-water and compost the product, you can be assured that it will meet the highest standards for unrestricted compost quality when you get there.
Fertilizer produced by our flagship Elmira facility has been specifically approved for use in certified organic farming, under Canadian Federal regulations. Ours was the first digestate-based fertilizer to ever receive such an approval in Canada. You can't get a better product quality endorsement than that.
It's no wonder that we've never had any difficulty at any of our facilities finding ready markets for all of the fertilizer that we can produce. It's very difficult to find a composting facility that can say that.
Please contact our office directly for a copy of:
- our Fertilizer Label, issued by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency
- our Certificate of Approval as a Crop Input for Certified Organic Farming, issued by the Centre for Systems Integration; or
- our SDS document for our fertilizer