A young farmer from Lachute doesn’t understand why local authorities want to prevent him from decarbonizing and increasing his income by producing gas with manure from his cows.
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“We’ve wanted to do a project like this for 10 years,” says Kevin Hammond, 30. He’s preparing to take over the farm, founded by his great-grandfather in 1921, from his father Benjamin.
The latest version of the project was submitted in the summer of 2021 by Keridis BioÉnergie, a Franco-Quebec company specializing in the biomethanation of agricultural residues.
Keridis plans to build giant closed tanks on the Hammonds’ land to produce methane by fermenting tens of thousands of tons of manure, manure and crop residues each year.
Less smells
“The manure stays there for about 60 days. It is converted into natural gas and digestate,” explains Simon Naylor, Vice President at Keridis.
The digestate is then used as fertilizer, but since it is a “digested” product it creates in some ways much less odor than untreated manure.
“It will disturb residents less than it has in the past,” emphasizes Mr. Naylor. But in addition, the digestate will contain mineralized nitrogen and phosphorus, so the Hammond family won’t have to buy as many chemical fertilizers.
The project envisages that the gas produced will be fed into the Énergir grid, which runs less than a kilometer from the Hammond farm.
Press once and then… no
At the end of August 2021, the general manager of the town of Lachute, Benoît Gravel, wrote to Keridis expressing the community’s support for the project.
However, the tide turned in the following months. “The city and MRC d’Argenteuil now want us to build our plant close to the landfill, but that would ruin the economics of the project because it’s six kilometers from our farm,” laments Mr Hammond.
“We would have to transport our manure by truck, which means 1,000 round trips per year,” he specifies, pointing to possible noise and… odor problems.
Lachute Mayor Bernard Bigras-Denis and Argenteuil Prefect Scott Pearce both declined our interview requests. In an email sent to the journal on Friday, MRC Deputy Director General Estelle Bédard expresses “concerns about the inconvenience that such a project, being too close to residential areas, could entail”. .
Trouble at Warwick
Ms Bédard did not provide any information on this potential inconvenience. Note, however, that Quebec’s first agricultural biogas project, which was inaugurated in 2021 in Warwick in the Center-du-Québec region, had problems with odors and vibrations last year, according to media La Nouvelle Union.
Simon Naylor acknowledges that difficulties can arise when launching a new installation.
“But it’s not crazy technology,” he says. It’s new to Quebecers, but there are 10,000 such factories in Germany, 1,200 in France, and hundreds in the United States. It’s not experimental.”
Kevin Hammond hopes local elected officials will change course.
“They are disconnected from what governments want to do for the environment,” he says.
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