The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A Bahamian waste provider consortium yesterday said Stellar Energy’s $400 million proposal for the New Providence landfill “makes no economic sense”, and warned against this nation being used as “a testing ground for unproven technology”.

The Waste Resources Development Group (WRDG,a 10-strong group of Bahamian waste services providers, expressed doubts over both the price tag and technology Stellar is proposing to employ should it ever be given the go-ahead by the Government to takeover the landfill’s management.

WRDG, whose members include BISX-listed Bahamas Waste, Impac, Wastenot and United Sanitation, wrote in a lengthy statement to Tribune Business that Stellar’s chosen plasma gasification technology had not been proven “commercially viable”.

It based this assessment on the fact that “all ventures” worldwide, which employed plasma gasification, had been forced to stop after they were unable to expand from ‘pilot project’ size and funds dried up.

The WRDG group also questioned why Stellar’s project, which was initially given a $650 million price tag, was “so expensive” when compared to larger waste-to-energy plants that had come “nowhere near” such capital investment costs.

Warning that Bahamians could be “left holding the bag” if Stellar’s project was given the go-ahead, only to fail, WRDG said daily waste streams added to the landfill would provide only one-third of the material needed to hit projected energy production targets.

Also expressing concern about a potential five to sixfold increase in tipping fees and other charges should Stellar gain approval, the WRDG group said a waste-to-energy facility of the nature it was proposing existed nowhere else in the world.

Stellar, which was embroiled in the infamous Letter of Intent (LOI) controversy that ultimately resulted in the resignation of then-parliamentary secretary, Renward Wells, refuted all WRDG’s assertions in an interview with Tribune Business yesterday (see other article on Page 1B).

This, though, is unlikely to alter the WRDG group’s scepticism about its plans to produce 75 Mega Watts (MW) of power per day from the New Providence landfill, which would then be sold to the Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) grid via a power purchase agreement (PPA).

“We know from our extensive research into plasma gasification (PG) that currently it is still an untested technology for processing household garbage,” WRDG said. “And the scale of the proposed [Stellar] facility makes no economic sense for a small landfill such as ours.

“Where in the world is the successfully operating facility that is producing the 75 MW of electricity from 1500 tonnes per day of ordinary household garbage, using the same technology you are proposing to use here in the Bahamas? A facility we can visit and inspect, to be assured of its reliability, its non-polluting emissions. We do not want to be a testing ground for an unproven technology, and definitely not on that scale or at that price.”

The WRDG statement was likely sparked by Stellar’s press release last week, in which the company indicated its continuing interest in taking over management of the New Providence landfill and deploying its waste-to-energy solution.

Tribune Business previously revealed that WRDG has submitted such a proposal of its own, offering an “integrated waste management” solution to the Tonique Williams Highway-based facility’s ongoing issues.

Stellar and WRDG thus appear to be rivals for the same potential business, with both seeking to fill the gap left when the previous manager, Renew Bahamas, withdrew its services in the wake of Hurricane Matthew.

The New Providence landfill is currently back under Department of Environmental Health Services (DEHS) care, and the ‘vacuum’ and uncertainty created by the absence of any plan for the facility has also helped create the ground for WRDG and Stellar’s ‘head-to-head’.

Given the environmental and health hazard posed by the landfill, and the increased risk of fires as the Bahamas goes into the ‘dry season’, most New Providence residents - especially those in nearby communities - will be hoping for a rapid solution.

Stellar yesterday said it was looking at other technologies besides plasma gasification, which the WRDG group said is currently used to destroy hazardous and “hard to dispose of” waste, such as radioactive and pharmaceutical materials.

“The tipping fees are usually very high, and the facilities rarely put electricity on to the grid because the electricity they do produce is needed by the technology itself,” WRDG said of plasma gasification.

It added that the only time the technology was successfully employed was when three plants were developed in Japan in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The largest, which processed 200 tonnes per day, was closed in 2013, and WRDG said none “put any appreciable amounts of electricity on to the grid”.

The Bahamian group conceded that several Canadian and UK firms had subsequently marketed their own plasma gasification plants for waste-to-energy, but none had met with success. As a result, it urged the Bahamas to “hesitate before considering a technology and company yet to prove themselves”.

“As of this date, all these ventures have stopped due to an inability to raise the funds to implement, often because the technologies had not scaled up from the pilot project size,” WRDG said.

“Though many of these technologies will eventually become commercially viable, they now have to conduct more research and development in order to scale up successfully.

“And here we come to the first very important question that Stellar needs to answer, and that is the price of their facility. With all these functioning and failed plants, some as big - and others bigger - than the one proposed by Stellar Energy, none came in anywhere near the $650 million price tag Stellar has proposed for the New Providence facility. Why is their facility so expensive?”

WRDG argued that Bahamians may be “left holding the bag” should Stellar’s project proceed, only to fail at a later date.

“They also said they needed 1,500 tons per day of combustible (paper, plastic, tyres, wood etc... stuff that can burn) waste in order to feed this facility,” WRDG said of Stellar.

“We produce approximately 500 tonnes per day of combustible waste. That means they would have to mine 1,000 tonnes per day from the existing landfill.

“Mining a landfill is a fairly new activity which comes with its own dangers and problems,” the WRDG group added. “Danger from the fires that will flare up once oxygen is introduced to already smouldering waste, danger from the threat of collapse when heavy machinery starts excavation in a badly compacted landfill filled with organic waste and problems, like the possibly prohibitive cost of sorting the old waste and the possibility that quite a lot of the combustible waste has already been consumed by old fires.

“Though we have lots of waste there are many unknowns, and if we have to guarantee Stellar 1,500 tonnes of garbage per day and are not able to produce it, we would have to pay them a shortfall fee per ton and that could end up being a big bill.

“The reality is the tipping fee would not be $10 per tonne any more; it would increase possibly to $60-$100 per tonne. So though we would gain some electricity on to the grid, and that should reduce our cost of electricity, we would be paying a lot more for garbage disposal than we do now, so what we gain on the swings we lose on the roundabouts.”

The WRDG group emphasised it was not against waste-to-energy, as it had proposed this to the Government “three times before” as part of a holistic New Providence landfill solution.

“We need to... know that for us, any waste-to-energy technology we consider for implementation here in the Bahamas needs to be able to substantiate its claims with examples of proven, reliable facilities, functioning on the same scale, utilising the same garbage for feedstock as we have here in the Bahamas,” WRDG said.

“That’s what WRDG did when we presented waste-to-energy as an option for waste management, and what we can present again if the Bahamian people want us to.”