Wheelabrator Technologies Inc. (Wheelabrator), a wholly owned subsidiary of Waste Management, Inc., has been selected by the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority (NMWDA), in conjunction with the Frederick County Division of Utilities and Solid Waste Management and Carroll Country Department of Public Works, as the preferred vendor to construct and operate a new, regional waste-to-energy facility. It will serve the solid waste disposal and energy needs of Frederick and Carroll counties.
The facility will be located in Frederick county.
Wheelabrator representatives will be joining the Authority and Frederick County staff in officially presenting the draft project agreements to the County Commissioners at a Feb. 3 public information meeting. The Frederick County Commissioners will hold a public hearing on the project on February 17, 2009.
A review by the Carroll County Board of Commissioners is expected to follow in March 2009.
The facility will be owned by the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority and will serve Frederick and Carroll counties under a long-term service agreement between the Authority and the counties.
Upon a positive vote from both counties’ Board of Commissioners, the permitting and approval phase will begin this spring and will take around two years, followed by a 3-year engineering and construction period. The projected completion date for the facility is 2014.
At the height of construction, the project is expected to employ 1,000 workers engaged in excavation, concrete work, electrical work, fabrication, and steelwork. Once completed, Wheelabrator expects to employ around 50 full-time employees to operate the plant.
The waste-to-energy plant will be capable of processing up to 1,500 tons per day of municipal solid waste with an electric generating capacity of 55 megawatts (MW); the equivalent of supplying the electrical needs of 60,000 homes.
By replacing fossil fuels in the generation of electricity, waste-to-energy facilities actively reduce the buildup of greenhouse gases. The Frederick waste-to-energy facility is expected to offset the release of around 500,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year. In fact, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stated that waste-to-energy plants produce electricity with “less environmental impact than almost any other source of electricity.”
At full capacity, the proposed facility would be able to produce 55 MW of clean, renewable electricity from every day trash, potentially eliminating the need for Maryland utilities to annually burn 500,000 barrels of oil or 130,000 tons of coal and further reducing the state of Maryland’s dependence on fossil fuel electric generation.
Together with Waste Management’s other renewable energy initiatives, this project will move the company toward meeting its sustainability goal of doubling its waste-based energy production from the equivalent of providing enough power from one million homes to two million homes by 2020.
“We conducted an extensive search of proven technologies to help us recover the energy in the counties’ non-recycled municipal solid waste. The new facility, if approved, will provide 100% of the counties’ governmental electricity needs, making the two counties among the first in the nation to achieve energy independence while significantly reducing carbon emissions,” said Robin B Davidov, executive director of the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority. “We believe Wheelabrator will help the counties move toward a more fully integrated waste disposal system that also includes the roll-out of a single-stream recycling program with an ambitious recycling goal of 60%.”
“We couldn’t be happier about being chosen for the privilege of constructing and operating the first waste-to-energy plant in the U.S. in over a decade,” said Mark A. Weidman, president of Wheelabrator. “As a pioneer in the U.S. waste-to-energy industry, Wheelabrator has established industry standards for safety and operating performance, as well as an excellent environmental record. We are once again ready to move the U.S. waste-to-energy industry forward, and what better place to start, than Frederick and Carroll counties.”