ZÃ? RATE, Argentina, March 31 (IPS) – Three giant concrete cylinders with inflatable membrane roofs are an eerie sight in the Zárate industrial park, a world of factories 90 kilometers from Buenos Aires that vehicles Heavy loads running back and forth all day Long. They are the heart of a plant that is about to start producing energy from agro-industrial waste, for the first time in Argentina.
“This is the first plant that will generate biogas using waste from the food industry. For example, fat from dairy companies or leftovers from meat processing plants where beef, chicken and pork are processed,” said Ezequiel Weibel, one of the partners in the company. labour projecttold IPS.
“In this country we’ve always been used to producing biogas using livestock wastewater or crop by-products, not other types of organic waste,” adds Weibel. , Weibel added, as he walked around the site and pointed to an area with dozens of huge bags of pigs. blood meal is reserved.
Weibel is a young agricultural engineer who founded the company in 2011 BGA Energía Sustentable with classmate Martín Pinos, with the support of IncUBAgro.
IncUBAgro is a program of School of Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), which encourages innovative projects that address agricultural, environmental and manufacturing issues.
The plant’s three bioreactors have a capacity of 12,000 cubic meters and are set up to receive approximately 146 tons of wet waste and 35 tons of dry waste per day from the eastern province of Buenos Aires. In large tanks, the waste will be stored without oxygen so that the bacteria can do their job.
The organic matter will undergo a rapid decomposition process, which will convert it to biogas, consisting of 60% methane and 40% carbon dioxide.
In turn, biogas will be supplied to a generator to produce electricity and connect to the national electricity grid, distributed throughout the country. The plant, which has an installed capacity of 1.5 megawatts (MW), is completed and is just waiting for the final red tape clearance to start operating.
The factory is located at the end of a short dirt road about 10 km from the highway to Buenos Aires, in the Zárate district, on the banks of the Paraná river, on an area of one and a half hectares.
A better solution for organic waste management
“This is a family business founded by my father,” said Agustín Patricio, one of the shareholders of Eittor, the company that owns the factory, told IPS. “We have been dealing with industrial waste for more than 20 years. Organic waste is mainly used to make compost, used as fertilizer…even though we know it can be used for energy production.”
Through international trade fairs, for many years the company has been following waste recycling and reuse solutions for energy production developed in countries such as Italy and Germany.
Patricio adds: “We are increasingly aware of the scarcity of energy and the pollution caused by its generation and use, and we believe that the idea of producing biogas using organic waste is a great solution. better law”.
The opportunity to implement the project came when public policies that supported the energy transition were adopted in Argentina – long dependent on oil and natural gas production – much later than in other countries in the world. area.
In September 2015, Congress sent an important signal in favor of clean energy by passing legislation promoting renewable sources of electricity.
The new law sets a target of 20% of Argentina’s electricity coming from renewable sources by 2025. It also stipulates that renewables will be given priority, so they are the first to enter the grid. electricity when there are different sources.
Therefore, on days when demand is lower, the percentage of renewable energy is higher. According to official figures, the historic peak occurred on September 26, 2021, when 28.84% of electricity consumption was covered by renewable energy.
Renovar’s Spring
With the impetus from the new law, the government enacted – between 2016 and 2018 – Renovar . Programheld three tenders for the construction of renewable energy projects.
The big incentive for private investors is the 20-year guaranteed purchase of electricity at a fixed dollar rate and a fund set up to guarantee payment, with guarantees from World Bankthe Bank for Investment and Foreign Trade of Argentina and other international and national credit bureaus.
As a result, renewables, which provided a negligible proportion of electricity to Argentina until 2015, have grown explosively since 2016, to the point where by 2021 they will meet 13% of total demand, according to numbers Official data from the Department of Energy.
Today, the country has 187 renewable energy projects in operation with a total installed capacity of 5182 MW. Most involve wind energy (74%), followed by solar power (13%), small hydro projects up to 50 MW (7%), and bioenergy (6%), such as solar energy. such as the Zárate factory, is one of the successful contractors. in the last three tenders of the Renovar Program.
Argentina’s electricity system has a total capacity of nearly 43,000 MW and continues to be supported mainly by natural gas-fired thermal power plants and large hydroelectric plants.
However, the brief clean energy spring in Argentina is over: there are currently no new renewable energy projects.
Furthermore, 33 projects awarded in the program that did not start due to lack of finance were canceled this year.
Gerardo Rabinovich, vice president of Instituto Argentina de Energía General Mosconia private research center, told IPS.
“This means that projects, even some that have been awarded, are no longer financially viable,” says Rabinovich.
The expert pointed out that another problem is the saturation of the electric transport system, which is especially important in a large country like Argentina, where large urban areas are concentrated in the center of the country.
Therefore, the Eittor factory is unlikely to be replicated for a long time in this Nam Non country, which is the third largest economy in the region after Brazil and Mexico.
Ezequiel Tamburrini, head of the biogas project, told IPS: “This is a dual solution, as the energy is generated while simultaneously solving the environmental problem caused by waste treatment.
“I would say that in Argentina there is no general awareness about the environmental problem of waste generation and most people don’t know that energy can be generated from waste. That’s why we are. must come up with a vision of this kind of initiative in the country,” he argued.
© Inter Press Service (2022) – All rights reservedOrigin: Inter Press Service
