Circular precincts have the potential to unlock significant value for the waste and resource recovery industry. Amal Jugdeo, Business Development Manager for Kanadevia INOVA, explains.
It is an exciting time for the waste-to-energy (WtE) sector. Western Australian projects in East Rockingham and Kwinana lead the way. From 2025 onwards, these facilities will jointly treat more than 760,000 tonnes of residual waste per annum (tpa) that would otherwise go to landfills.
Victoria is not far behind. The Maryvale WtE facility is licensed to process 650,000 tpa of residual waste, and a few more projects are in the permitting phase.
Plans are also afoot for WtE facilities in New South Wales and South Australia.
The standout is Queensland’s City of Gold Coast, which has bold ambitions to reduce its reliance on the Stapylton and Reedy Creek landfills and aspires to achieve 97 per cent landfill diversion. It proposes an Advanced Resource Recovery Centre (ARRC) circular precinct with recycling, composting/anaerobic digestion, hydrogen production, and a WtE plant of more than 500,000 tpa residual waste.
It’s all well that project developers are pursuing WtE projects across Australia as a more sustainable waste management solution than landfills. However, some harsh realities must be considered when exploring the viability of such large and advanced WtE facilities, says Amal Jugdeo, Business Development Manager at the Sydney office of Kanadevia INOVA.
Amal says it is all too easy for project developers to jump into costly design and engineering studies only to realise at the end of the exercise that the business case is challenged.
He says landfill levies in Australia are simply too low to justify investment in a conventional stand-alone WtE solution – we therefore must think bigger and smarter!
Circular precincts
“Circular precincts make for a bigger resource recovery party,” he says. “Co-locating a WtE facility with other waste processing facilities, such as a material recovery facility (MRF), an organics processing facility, and other industrial facilities requiring steam or heat, has the potential to unlock significant value.
“In this way, waste receival can be centralised to take advantage of shared infrastructure such as weighbridges and workshops; non-recyclables and reject waste streams can be processed at the WtE facility while the WtE facility can provide ‘behind-the-grid’ electricity to the nearby facilities.
“The centralised processing of various waste streams will positively impact the business case.”
Plant size
He says when it comes to ‘bigger’, look no further than the world’s largest WtE facility in Dubai. Kanadevia Inova (KVI) designed the five-line 126MWth boiler facility that will process 1.9 million tpa of residual waste.
KVI has hundreds of WtE references, a strong balance sheet from Japanese parent Kanadevia Corporation, and invests significantly in research and development. It is no surprise that WtE plants have increased considerably in throughput per line over the years – from 300,000 tpy/line in the early 2000s (Greatmoor, United Kingdom), to 325,000 tpy/y (FMI1 and FM2, UK) to 360,000 tpy/y (Dubai) to now 450,000 tpy/line for the two-line 140MWth Abu-Dhabi plant currently in construction.
These ultra-large combustion boilers yield the lowest capex per ton of waste processed.
Construction costs
Amal says increases in construction costs are a significant challenge for the industry. In Victoria, for example, the largest construction union negotiated a 21.5 per cent pay rise for workers over five years, and similar arrangements have been reached by unions in New South Wales and Queensland.
“This alone places significant cost pressure on labour-intensive projects such as WtE plants. Add to these, fluctuations in the international steel and process equipment market, and it becomes clear that it is no easy task to peg construction costs for a WtE plant that has a large mechanical, electrical and piping component with a high degree of certainty as one would a commercial office building or bridge for example.
“Project financiers need price certainty; without this, projects are simply not bankable. It is imperative that credible players conduct comprehensive engineering and project management studies to quantify construction costs with a high degree of certainty and derisk the project before proceeding with project execution.”
Aggregate re-use
Approximately 20 per cent by mass of the waste treated at the WtE facility will result in Incinerator Bottom Ash (IBA). Once metals are recovered from the IBA for recycling, the resulting IBA is processed into aggregate suitable for use in the road and construction industry.
This is also well established in the UK and provides a precedent in a similar jurisdiction when seeking regulatory approval in Australia. Victoria and Western Australia have made progress in this regard. Without regulatory approval for the reuse, the IBA aggregate must be disposed of in a landfill, weakening the business case, Amal says.
Again, bigger is better. A centralised large IBA treatment plant processing IBA from multiple WtE plants further reduces the unit cost of IBA disposal. This approach is common in Europe.
“It is clear that a bigger party is better when it comes to WtE in Australia,” Amal says. “WtE should be seen as central to the success of circular resource recovery precincts. We must push the technology boundaries and increase the scale of WtE and IBA treatment facilities.
“IBA must be seen as a resource for the construction industry, and there should be a clear regulatory pathway to enable this. We should partner with credible players and only after sufficient design work is done to quantify construction costs adequately.
“It is the only credible pathway to an environmentally and financially sustainable alternative to landfill for our ever-increasing residual waste.”
For more information, visit:
www.kanadevia-inova.com
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