Heather Wright/The Independent

After years of planning and nearly two years of construction, WM’s renewable natural gas plant in Watford is almost ready for production.

Since September, crews have been working to bring the $150 million plant and pipeline up to standard to bring it online and sell to Enbridge Gas.

The methane produced at Twin Creeks – one of the largest in Ontario – already powers a nearby greenhouse complex. But only 40 per cent of what is produced by the 1.4 million tonnes of waste hauled to the site yearly is used at the greenhouse.

In March 2023, the company announced it was planning to convert the methane gas created in the landfill to natural gas.

The plant takes the landfill gas and removes a number of compounds including oxygen, nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide to clean the gas up to almost pure methane for natural gas pipeline quality.

The Renewable Natural Gas facility on the site will power its own municipal collection trucks and feed into a new Enbridge pipeline connecting to the Dawn facility while still supplying gas for the nearby greenhouse which has expanded.

Wayne Jenken, the landfill’s engineering manager, says construction began in the spring of 2024.

“It’s been just over two years of on-site construction. It’s a significant undertaking. We’re talking north of $150 million in construction costs to bring this facility online – that includes the facility itself, meaning what you see on site, as well as the pipeline that takes gas away from the RNG facility.

WM has been working mainly with the Technical Standards and Safety Association on the systems inside the RNG facility.

“It’s a complex facility and just working through those pieces, stage by stage, to make sure that everything functions as it should,” says Jenken.

“That’s without proving the gas quality. That itself is part of the commissioning process, meaning in order to produce renewable natural gas, it needs to meet specific requirements. Those same requirements as natural gas, so BTU value and purity, cleanliness, all those sorts of things… ensuring that we meet all those requirements throughout the process and produce a quality product at the end.”

Jenken is hopeful the commissioning process will be complete by the end of October.

The project has been watched closely by Warwick Township and residents, wondering if by capturing more methane there will be less smell coming from the landfill. Jenken says that is likely, but it isn’t the reason for the project.

“We’re doing this project because it’s intended to produce income – produce revenue, so that is driving the landfill
to be more efficient and more effective with our gas capture,” Jenken says.

“There are provincial standards and provincial regulations for landfills to have gas collection systems that meet minimum requirements. Our our facility in Watford has always exceeded those, but now this is having this RNG project is justification for us to go a step beyond that, to do that little bit more, capture a little more gas, thereby reducing things like air emissions or odour emissions.”

The plant will produce enough natural gas to power 35,000 homes a year. If WM were to stop accepting garbage at the site, it would produce natural gas for another 30 years.