City council meets: Plasco receives another extension,
Company has until the end of 2014 to finance its waste-to-energy plant
City council is getting impatient with the Plasco Energy Group’s promises that it can vaporize thousands of tonnes of garbage, but is willing to give the company a little more time to get its financing together and start building its waste-to-energy plant.
By a 17-5 vote Wednesday, council agreed to extend an imminent deadline for Plasco to put together the $200 million it needs to construct a large-scale plasma gasification facility near the Trail Road landfill. Its chief executive Rod Bryden has said the company will miss an Aug. 31 deadline built into its contract with the city not because the company has fundamental problems but because particular chunks of borrowing depend on decisions about exactly what pieces of equipment it will buy from which suppliers.
It’s the second extension Plasco has received, from a financing deadline first set for last March. Now the company will have until December 2014 to get its money in order. Other deadlines in its contract with the city — particularly that it has to start processing garbage by March 2016 — are unchanged.
If Plasco’s process for breaking down garbage really worked, Coun. Peter Clark argued, the company would have the money it needs from lenders.
Coun. Tim Tierney, who voted against the extension, said he’s a bit tired of being asked about Plasco at provincial and national meetings of municipal leaders. The company often promotes itself at those meetings, and councillors and mayors from other municipalities ask him how Plasco is doing. He doesn’t know what to tell them, he said, and he’s worried there’s a risk to the city’s reputation.
“I really hope it works,” Tierney said. But he thinks Plasco is at least a decade from having a working plant and he doesn’t want to waste any more time.
Coun. Peter Clark agreed. “The evidence should have been in that the practice outcomes are there,” he said. If Plasco’s process for breaking garbage down into its component particles and converting them into a burnable gas and a small amount of glassy slag really worked, Clark argued, the company would have the money it needs from lenders.
Councillors Rainer Bloess, Rick Chiarelli, Keith Egli and Diane Holmes joined Tierney in voting against the extension. (Clark was absent when the vote was called.)
The dominant attitude around the council table, though, was that Plasco is the only party really at risk, since the city’s paying nothing until Plasco starts taking city garbage in quantity, so there’s no reason to cut and run from the contract the city signed with the company last year.