By Lynn Warburton
From the outside it looks like an unassuming sleek shed set amongst the woods of UBC’s Vancouver campus. But on the inside is a powerhouse designed to reduce UBC’s greenhouse gas emissions while providing heat and electricity to the campus and learning opportunities to faculty and student researchers.
The Bioenergy Research and Demonstration Facility, which officially opened on September 13, 2012, contains a combined heat and power (CHP) system fueled with biomass—wood chips—that provide a clean alternative to fossil fuels.
“It’s a unique system that fulfills an operational need and helps us achieve climate goals,” says Steve Cockcroft, UBC professor of Materials Engineering. “As the University grows, we have to increase the power and heat supply to meet demands, but we must also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Most university researchers don’t have access to a full-scale system such as this. The facility brings UBC’s campus operations together with academics and technology partners Nexterra Systems Corp. and GE Energy in a real-world setting to take positive action using alternative energy.
The process begins with biomass and produces synthesis gas (syngas) that fuels both the heat and electricity generators. “The electricity production is the most innovative and exciting part,” says Jeff Giffin, UBC’s Alternative Energy Manager. “Syngas can now be cleaned to such an extent that it can run a 20-piston engine and produce two megawatts of energy.”
With this facility, UBC will reduce its natural gas consumption by 12 per cent and GHG emissions by 9,000 tonnes, the equivalent of taking 1,882 cars off the road each year.
“Less than 10 years ago it seemed impossible to get a clean alternative fuel supply from wood,” says, Brent Sauder, Director of Strategic Partnerships at UBC. “Now we know that with further research, completely clean biomass fuel is achievable.” New studies still to come at the Bioenergy Research and Demonstration Facility include hydrogen and fuel cell research and electro-chemical battery storage.
Wood is omnipresent in the building. Visitors’ eyes are drawn to the wooden supports and structures that represent the first commercial application of cross-laminated timber, an alternative to steel beams that is now used in multi storey buildings and is made in BC of locally grown wood. Visitors’ noses can’t mistake the clean, tingly smell of wood chips.
The facility is an exemplary demonstration of UBC’s Campus as a Living Lab concept, bringing together innovative thinking, with practical resources to make a positive change that is replicable and transferrable to the world beyond the campus.
UBC’s size of some 50,000 students, staff, faculty and residents, with over 400 buildings, is ideally suited to conducting research on the ways in which heat and power can be generated at a community scale. Research conducted at UBC is expected to lead to similar-sized communities considering the use of locally available biomass that can reduce their dependency on fossil fuels.
UBC’s carbon reduction targets, which include a 67 per cent reduction of institutional greenhouse gases by 2020 and zero emissions by 2050, as outlined in its Climate Action Plan, are the most aggressive among top 40 universities.