A young farmer from Lachute does not understand why the local authorities want to prevent him from decarbonizing and increasing his income by producing gas with the manure from his cows.

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“We’ve wanted to do a project like this for 10 years,” says Kevin Hammond, 30. He is preparing to take over from his father, Benjamin, the farm founded in 1921 by his great-grandfather.

The most recent version of the project was submitted in the summer of 2021 by Keridis BioÉnergie, a Franco-Quebec company specializing in the biomethanization of agricultural residues.

Keridis wants to build, on the land of the Hammonds, huge closed tanks to produce methane by fermenting, each year, tens of thousands of tons of manure, slurry and crop residues.

Fewer odors

“The manure stays in there for regarding 60 days. It is transformed into natural gas and digestate”, explains Simon Naylor, vice-president at Keridis.

The digestate is then used as fertilizer, but since it is a “digested” product, in a way, it generates much less odor than untreated manure.

“It will disturb the inhabitants less than at present, underlines Mr. Naylor. But in addition, the digestate will have mineralized nitrogen and phosphorus, so the Hammond family will not have to buy so many chemical fertilizers.

The project provides that the gas produced will be injected into the Énergir network, which passes less than a kilometer from the Hammond farm.

One press and then… no

At the end of August 2021, the general manager of the City of Lachute, Benoît Gravel, expressed the municipality’s support for the project in a letter sent to Keridis.

However, the tide turned in the months that followed. “The City and the MRC d’Argenteuil now want us to build our plant near the landfill, but that would kill the economy of the project because it’s six kilometers from our farm,” laments Mr. Hammond.

“We would have to transport our manure by truck, which represents 1000 round trips per year”, he specifies, referring to potential problems of noise and… odors.

The mayor of Lachute, Bernard Bigras-Denis, and the prefect of Argenteuil, Scott Pearce, both refused our interview requests. In an email sent to Journal Friday, the deputy director general of the MRC, Estelle Bédard, raises “concerns in connection with the inconveniences that might bring such a project located too close to residential areas”.

Problems at Warwick

M^me Bédard did not specify what these potential inconveniences were. Note, however, that the first agricultural biogas project in Quebec, inaugurated in 2021 in Warwick, in the Centre-du-Québec region, experienced odor and vibration problems last year, according to the media. The New Union.

Simon Naylor acknowledges that difficulties can arise when starting a new installation.

“But it’s not crazy technology,” he says. It’s new for Quebecers, but there are 10,000 factories like that in Germany, 1,200 in France and hundreds in the United States. It’s not experimental.”

Kevin Hammond hopes that local elected officials will change course.

“They are disconnected from what governments want to do for the environment,” he denounces.