Two St. Albert businessmen are using a big hot tube to help international clients transform waste into energy.
Ian Soder and Jason Holtz held a grand opening Dec. 6 for Complete Solutions Consulting Inc. Established in 2020 this two-person company designs and distributes waste-to-energy systems throughout North America.
Soder, the company’s founder, said he got interested in waste to energy technology several years ago through a friend who introduced him to Biomass Energy Techniques (BET), an Edmonton-based company that builds a tube-shaped machine that turns waste into char. Impressed, Soder founded Complete Solutions to distribute the device in Canada. After a six-month trial run of the machine in Stony Plain in 2021, Soder and Holtz went on to set up sites using it in Chicago, Ill., Lincoln, Neb., Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Acheson Industrial Area in Parkland County.
Holtz said he and Soder started out as competitors in the construction industry. Holtz later started a specialty metals company, and had Soder as a customer. The two of them reconnected a few years back after their kids attended the same school. Holtz signed on to join Complete Solutions soon after.
Trash power
Soder said his company aims to help clients keep waste out of the landfill.
“Anything we put in the landfill is put there purely to rot,” he said, releasing heat-trapping pollution in the process.
Complete Solutions designs systems based around BET’s machine to turn waste into energy and other products, Soder explained.
The BET machine is essentially a big, hot, tube-shaped, rotating oven. Waste goes in one end (typically wood, but it also works with municipal waste, sewage, and railroad ties) and enters the tube, which acts as an oxygen-free hearth.
The tube is initially heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius using fossil fuels, Soder said. This causes molecules in the waste to break up and recombine as ash/char and various gases instead of CO2 — a process called pyrolysis. Those gases can be burned in the tube to keep it warm without external heating or used to produce heat and electricity for buildings or other processes. The char comes out the tube and, depending on the nature of the waste it came from, can be used as a soil amendment, burned for heat, or buried to store carbon.
Soder said these pyrolysis systems have helped some U.S. cities reduce their waste volumes to landfill by about 85 per cent. Whether or not they make economic sense depends on a whole host of factors, including waste type, landfill fees, and energy costs. They’re also relatively new, and industry was still figuring out ways to use the char they produce.
Soder said he and Holtz hope to set up waste-to-energy facilities across North America, and predicted they would become more popular as awareness of the technology spread.
Visit csc-int.ca for more on Complete Solutions.