It was disappointing — but certainly not surprising — to see the Province give its blessing last week to the biodigester that’s now scheduled to be constructed at Rimrock Feeders in Foothills County west of High River.
The idea for this project surfaced last year in response to the loud, frequent and ongoing complaints from residents, mostly in High River, regarding the stench emanating from the large-scale feedlot. No company, no matter how magnanimous it might be, willingly spends somewhere in the neighbourhood of $70 million to solely address odour complaints, so right there you knew the biodigester was far more than just a high-tech way to give neighbours the ability to enjoy their back decks again or allow them to keep their windows open on those warm summer nights.
No, this undertaking quickly morphed from one of odour suppression to something far more lucrative — energy generation — as Tidewaters Renewables expects the biodigester to produce enough renewable natural gas to heat approximately 6,000 homes per year. To reach this target, the company will not only use the manure generated on site, but will need to truck in copious amounts of food waste.
It’s clear now that all those odour complaints indirectly paved the way for a large-scale industrial operation to set up shop on farmland, where it’s much cheaper to build and where it certainly doesn’t belong.
The kicker — and this is where it really hurts — is there are no assurances that after this $70-million project is built that the odour issue will materially improve.
There’s a possibility the community might not be a whole lot better off odour-wise when this so-called solution is eventually constructed. The company behind the project, on the other hand, will almost assuredly be better off once it can start turning all that waste into natural gas.
