Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society

Abbotsford, Canadá

An Overview Of Our Solution

Our mission is Zero Waste Agriculture. Our program is Technology Meets Permaculture. Our path is extreme resource efficiency, through integrated solution innovation. Our first complete site will be called Symbiosis Centre for Zero Waste Agriculture.” Phosphorus supply is a key to industrial scale agriculture, and the majority of the worlds exploitable supply is in Morocco. Everywhere there are concentrations of animals, there are excesses of both Phosphorus and Nitrogen, polluting out air sheds and waterways, while squandering value We start with animal manures in locations with strong concentrations. We mix them, cook them, and hit them with a number of technologies in optimized configurations, finishing the process by cultivating a fast growing, nutrient dense plant called duckweed.

Who is this solution impacting?

Community Type

Urban

Suburban

Rural

Organization type

Sin fines de lucro/No Gubernamental

Ecosystem (select all that apply)

Deserts

Forests

Freshwater

Grasslands

Oceans/Coasts

Urban/Built Environment

Population impacted

More than 1 billion within 10 years.

Size of agricultural area

We have a very small footprint, and will be distributed (multiple locations) embedded in Ag communities

Production quantity

Ours is a modular solution that can begin as small as a single shipping container, with unlimited scaling capacity.

People employed

We are predominatly a volunteer army at this point. At full capacity there will be up to 10 employees/operators

Describe your solution

See www.catalystpower.ca legacy of this important work, with links to the 2007/08 feasibility studies on anaerobic digestion for the Fraser Valley. 2010 - Built the first on farm anaerobic digester in BC • First on farm digester in North America to deliver RNG to a grid for sale. • Processes manure from 800 cows/100k chickens/25% industrial food processing waste • Delivers RNG to 1000+ homes and businesses • Developed First public RNG program, now oversold • National commitments to 5% renewable blend by 2025, and 10% by 2030 • BC leads supply volume with 0.5% coming from 6 sources 2014 - Installed the first nutrient extraction system on a farm digester in Canada • Proved a robust, reliable, and economical solution • Capturing 90% of the Phosphorus and 50% of the nitrogen • Allowed farm to get permitting otherwise not possible 2015 - Built the first developmental duckweed growth chamber • Finishing stage of a nutrient value add/waste water cleaning • Showed production at least 100 times that of the same footprint for either corn or soya • No environmental losses at all! 2016/2017 – Recognition • TEDx talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvRyI8o5xA • Singularity University https://exponential.singularityu.org/summit/ggc/environment/ • National Zero Waste Conference profile http://players.brightcove.net/775281566001/default_default/index.html?videoId=5157920265001 • Modern Agriculture Magazine http://modernagriculture.ca/zero-waste-agriculture-bc/

Describe your implementation

Our implementation is the realization of a 10 year mission; create an applied sciences centre where ALL of Agriculture and Agri-Foods will come together with the whole BioIndustrial complex, using the tools of Industrial Symbiosis. It is a state of the art, community scale anaerobic digester in a full commercial operation, to be operated as a living lab, designed to welcome enabling and competing solutions. The facility will be technologically agnostic, with the driver being extreme resource efficiency in pursuit of the ultimate, Zero Waste Agriculture. We will test all theories and stories in real world scale, on a grand transparent stage, with the world watching. The Symbiosis Centre for Zero Waste Agriculture will: • Process manure from up to 2000 cows, and 2 million chickens • Deliver advantageous products for the supplying farmers fertilizers • Reduce/eliminate odour • Reduce or eliminate the pathogens, rendering the fertilizer products safe • Upgrade all nutrients to plant available, and stabilize the nutrients insuring crop uptake • Provide a channel for the excesses to be relocated to places where they are needed. • Produce a new feed for the animals, reducing the quantity of feed imported We have ensured that our solution is adopted by: • Spending many years building the plan, finding and developing the solutions • Hitting our stride exactly as the global forces we predicted are coming to bear • Invested more than $6 million dollars to prove the solution in our own facility • Working with several farmers throughout the process • Being in place and established as new manure management regulations, with heightened scrutiny are about to be released in B.C. • Deliver the lowest cost, most environmentally advantageous solution possible The key success factor was overcoming the myriad of obstacles that came with building a digester and a nutrient extraction system that have passed the test of time, where many, many have failed.

External connections

Our solution is about extreme resource efficiency, eliminating waste and wastefulness. The Agricultural program discussed here rolls up into the larger BC Centre for BioResource Innovation, a cluster of clusters to fulfill the Canadian Federal Innovation Agenda. There are many groups playing a part in this plan including: • Fortis BC, the gas utility • KPD Consulting/Trident Processes • Muddy River Technologies • Hallbar Consulting Ltd • Sumas Lake Aquafarm Ltd. • FP Innovations • Seabreeze Farms • Singularity University Canada • Sumas Regional Consortium for High Tech (Venture Accelerator) • HeroX (competition designers/administrators) • Eagle Ridge Innovations Corp. It is recognized that agriculture and forestry innovation have tremendous alignments, and potentials for shared values. All of nature benefits when waste and wastefulness are reduced and/or eliminated. The base project has tremendous benefits for agriculture, solutions that are desperately needed. The design of the facility insures that these continue to be driven forward, allowing the “cream” of sustainability solutions to rise to the top. This program drives jobs, revenue, environmental impact mitigation, and food security. It allows industry to reach the changing demands from government regulators, and address the loss of public trust at the same time.

What is the environmental or ecological challenge you are targeting with your solution?

Our focus is nutrient loading from intensive livestock operations. We target the common, wildly inefficient functions of the nutrient cycle. We were motivated by the acute threat where we live (Fraser Valley), where we have an average annual 50% excess of Phosphorus, and 30% Nitrogen, seeping into the unconfined aquifer, and damaging the sensitive air shed. We import much of our feed from out of the area, and spread all of the manures as near to the barn as possible. Our solution takes these manures, and separates them into the individual components. From manure, we make reusable water, biogas, several fertilizer products, and a sustainable feed product (duckweed) identified as a potential to solve ALL of the food challenges of the world.

Describe the context in which you are operating

Our program launched more than 10 years ago when we built the first anaerobic digester for agriculture in the Province of BC. (Catalyst Power Inc.) This was the first on farm digester in all of North America to scrub the gas for utility grid injection. (Globally we were 126 out of more than 12000 digesters to do this) In 2014 I installed the first full nutrient extraction system on a farm digester in Canada (Seabreeze Farms). At the same time, we installed the same system (only MUCH larger) at one of the most influential dairy farms in America. (Fair Oaks Farms) In 2015 we built our first duckweed growth chamber, working with a closed containment fish farm (tilapia), cleaning the water by growing the plant. Our entire program, facility, and equipment selection is all done to insure the ability to isolate individual variables. While we work on complete “cradle to cradle” solutions, the components being advanced can be established in a range of install orders to allow immediate impact/return, allowing the most to be done, with the least amount of resources. Our program design is expressly orchestrated to allow us to work/serve in all contexts of food production.
There are roughly 58000 dairy cows, and more than 92 million chickens raised in BC alone. If we will feed 9 billion and maintain a planet we MUST eliminate waste and wastefulness.

How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?

We have made a positive impact on the local environment in several ways. Methane is at least 23x as damaging in the environment as CO2. Our first project has caused nearly 20 million cubic metres of methane from being released to the atmosphere, instead, cleaning it and sending it to homes and businesses for fuel. Every year the two facilities I work with process nearly 1 million gallons of manure and food processing waste. Symbiosis Centre for Zero Waste Agriculture will more than double these numbers, and address nutrient loading in a more comprehensive way by including poultry and hog manure. Large scale livestock agriculture has serious impacts on aquifers. There is a situation in motion right now here in BC, where an 1100 cow dairy farm has been pinpointed as the cause of aquifer contamination, and 183 people can no longer drink their well water. We can fix that too…

Language(s)

English

Water

Excess nutrients creat havoc on surface waterways and aquifers. Our work to reduce nutrient loading from farms takes pressure off of important feeded streams that fild fish stocks depend on.

Food Security/Nutrition

Ours is a complete solution that serves double duty by using excess nutrients to produce a new sustainable feed. It both supports

Economic/Sustainable Development

Digesters can be a part of a sustainable agriculture program, but only a part. Multiple revenue streams can be created around a digester, allowing a farm to grow in animal units, without needing to add land. It also helps protect farms from potential penalties for non compliance with regulations. We need food, and our solution protects the farms in many ways.

Climate

GHG reductions, reduced pressure on aquifers and surface waterways, reduced transportation of both feed and manures.

Sustainability

All of our work has been to dispel the myths that grants are required to build sustainable agriculture solutions. By shifting to renewable natural gas we advanced the business case for digesters. Our wisdom 10 years ago has been clearly proven now by the drop in value of electricity value caused by wind and solar supply; neither help reduce GHG or nutrient loading. There are few other sources of Renewable Natural Gas. Our gas utility is running a campaign to find new supply of RNG, and has been an active partner throughout our work.
Our project is revenue positive on the sale of RNG alone, allowing us the capacity to take the pressure off of the rest of the components.

Return on investment

Typical anaerobic digestion ROI schedules offered in proposals to farmers show a 5-7 year payback. The reality in Canada has been much longer; many see negative ROI for several years, and others never make it to a positive business case. Our project is different because we radically drive down the capital cost, and the operational costs. We have a VERY conservative 4 year ROI is all other activities do not pay back. There are three different solution providers included in this project, and each of them has a 3 year ROI for their component. Total capital cost for the new facility is $6 million. This is roughly 1/3 the cost per tonne processed of any other digester in Canada.

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How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?

All of the pieces co-located in this project have been built before individually, and at Seabreeze we have two of them installed. We anticipate there is capacity for at least 150 facilities like this in Canada, and at least 1500 in the USA. The peripheral technologies integrated here present a business opportunity for the European market, where Germany alone has more than 9500 anaerobic digesters. Our project was designed to be scalable to serve various clusters of farms. Our plan is devised to serve between 5 and 20 farms in a controlled geographical area. The future facilities will be built as co-operatives with the contributing farms.

YouTube URL

Zero Waste Agriculture profile

Overview