Plasco gets 5-month extension,
Contract not in place
Plasco Energy Group has another five months to pull together the financing and start letting contracts for a garbage-to-energy plant the city wants it to build near the Trail Road landfill.
The complex deal between Plasco and the city had a deadline looming at the end of March, meant to be an early warning that the homegrown high-tech company couldn’t get its act together to turn its promising but unproven technology into a commercial success. And it’s going to miss that deadline, more than a year after company impresario Rod Bryden insisted he needed a quick approval from city council to get the project moving.
Plasco promises to take city garbage as it’s dumped off the back of a truck and run it through a high-temperature “plasma gasification” process that results in a small amount of glassy slag and a synthetic gas that can be burned to generate electricity. The city expects to pay $83.25 for each tonne of garbage Plasco processes — double the operating cost of its landfill, but with the expectation that that will put off having to open a new one someplace by nearly three decades. The deal is for 20 years with options to extend it to 40.
“I don’t want to see Plasco die because of an artificial deadline that they gave us with regards to March,” said Councillor Maria McRae, the chair of city council’s environment committee, who moved to grant Plasco the extension. The company had trouble nailing down a contract with the provincial government to sell it the electricity Plasco expects to produce.
Bryden wasn’t at Wednesday’s city council meeting, where councillors agreed unanimously to extend the deadline to the end of August, leaving city manager Kent Kirkpatrick to speak on his behalf. Kirkpatrick said Bryden initially proposed a shorter extension but Kirkpatrick urged him to request a longer one, to reduce the chance of having to come back and beg for another. August should be safe, as far as Kirkpatrick knew.
“It’s not my place to speak to it beyond that,” the city manager said.
Kirkpatrick couldn’t or wouldn’t supply a straight answer about whether the extension means the whole Plasco project is behind schedule or whether delays in building the plant can be made up later.