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The fate of a proposed biodigester in Foothills County is still up in the air, but what we learned from a public meeting last week is that even if the contentious project gets provincial approval, it will only do so much to alleviate those ongoing odour complaints.
That, in a word, stinks.
When the biodigester proposal came to light last year, many viewed it as a possible solution to the stench that emanates from the Rimrock Feeders feedlot west of High River, a smell that’s most pungent when the weather warms. Proponents were careful not to make any promises in that regard, and it stood to reason they weren’t spending somewhere in the neighbourhood of $65 million simply to be good neighbours and address the odour.
This project has always been about building a facility that would turn manure from the feedlot, as well as food waste that would be trucked from supermarkets and the like to the site, into natural gas, leaving odour suppression as a secondary benefit.
We now know, thanks to a presentation at the meeting hosted by Foothills County last Wednesday, that the company expects to see a 42 per cent reduction in odour if the biodigester is built, but it’s hard to know exactly what that means for long-suffering nostrils downwind from the feedlot, beyond the fact there will still be a stench, but it won’t be as bad.
Some will argue this is all happening in an agricultural area so people must be accepting of farming smells, and there’s certainly validity to such sentiment, but there’s another argument that an energy plant, which is most definitely an industrial operation, is being proposed for farmland.
If the latter is indeed the case, and given the millions in revenue such a facility would be able to generate over the years, then you’d think that perhaps more could, or should, be done to mitigate a smell that has negatively impacted the quality of life for so many people.
