Ambitious EEC Energy finalizing R & D agreements.

A small Thunder Bay company with ambitious plans to bring a manure and sludge digester to market is poised to strike a deal with a major energy partner.

Last month, EEC Energy Corp. was set to finalize a merger agreement with an undisclosed Toronto-area renewable energy company to allow the start-up firm to pursue opportunities in the agri-food industry.

In the negotiating stages for several months, Jeff Stubbings, EEC's vice-president of business development, says their partner will provide them with enough financing, research and development and marketing support to pursue multi-million projects across North America.

But before they tackle the United States market, they want to make their digester system commercially viable in Ontario.

EEC was formed specifically to commercialize and market their anaerobic digester.

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The patent-pending system is majority owned by Gerald Dykstra of Circle 'D' Farms, whose property and manure pile has become their lab site to experiment with the prototype.

For the last three years, Stubbings and his business partners, company president Keith Wilson and vice-president Rod Wade Sr. have been tinkering and testing the system, dubbed the ADvantage System Anaerobic Digester, on Dykstra's beef farm south of Thunder Bay.

Stubbings worked for years as an insurance industry underwriter advising Ontario municipalities like Walkerton on issues like environmental impairment liabilities.

He worked in a brokerage firm with Wade who knew Wilson through an acquaintance. Wilson brings years of engineering experience in waste treatment facilities in the mining, pulp and paper industry.

Their anaerobic digestion system uses microbes to transform feces into methane.

Stubbings says unlike most Europe-made mesophilic digesters, which operate roughly in the range of human body temperature, their thermophilic version operates at a higher temperature (50 to 55 C) which kills more pathogens and produces more gas.

The feedstock is "pretty much anything organic other than wood." They've been experimenting with various raw materials including barley pellets earlier this year to measure the gas production.

What's produced is a biogas of mostly methane with about 15 to 20 per cent carbon dioxide (CO 2). Their system removes much of the CO 2 to cleaner burning methane.

It can be used for a boiler system or a cogeneration unit with the energy sold into the provincial power grid.

Although their digester was designed to process manure, the partners are widening their scope beyond selling units to cattle farms to concentrate on the bigger agri-food industry in southern Ontario, namely vegetable processors, brewers and distillers.

With the price tag for a digester in the $1 million range, Stubbings says Ontario simply does not have huge factory farms for a reasonable return on investment as well as the economies of scale to pursue that waste market.

Pursuing the agri-food business affords customers a much quicker pay back.

Stubbings and his partners believe there's mega-potential for Ontario companies to process their food waste into a useful by-product and generate what they estimate is between 1000 and 1500-megawatt hours of untapped electricity.

By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business