Anaerobic Digestion, or biodigestion, is not a new technology – but harnessing nature’s power and transforming waste-to-energy is a great way to make the most of our valuable resources. Azura’s Dave Ellis was invited to join Sohal Hasnie on the Energypreneurs podcast to talk about the history and science behind anaerobic digestion and share practical applications for this often carbon negative fuel. Click the link below to listen to the podcast or scroll down to read the full transcript.
Sohail Hasnie: Welcome to Energypreneurs. Energypreneurs is a platform where you meet actual practitioners working with electric vehicles, solar power and batteries. I’m your host. Sohail Hasnie, I’ve been in the power sector for about 40 years, including a 23 year stint at the Asian Development Bank. I’m very excited about these technologies, and to share that we are able to complete 150 episodes by the end of 2023, looking forward to a fantastic 2024.
Thank you for joining. The food that we eat, the waste that we generate, it has lot of values for fertilizer, for electricity, and this can be recycled quite nicely. So here is a conversation with David Ellis, who will take us through this journey how the technologies can be used for a large scale and small-scale systems to take our waste, not ending up in a landfill somewhere, but again, be part of the bigger ecosystem. Thank you for listening.
Good morning David from Manila.
David Ellis: Good morning. Sohail. Nice to see you. I’m from Toronto, Canada.
Sohail Hasnie: Yeah. I mean, let’s introduce yourself and get into this conversation. I’m very excited about this topic, something I have not talked with someone yet.
David Ellis: Well, thank you so much. So my topic is anaerobic digestion of organic waste. My background is in chemical engineering. My name is David Ellis, and I’m the founder here at Azura Associates, we’re a niche process engineering company. Anaerobic Digestion is the only potentially carbon negative fuel in the world. There – that’s the end of the podcast. That’s the answer. It is the only one in the world that’s potentially carbon negative, and it’s because we’re able to take food waste and other organic wastes and harvest the energy that comes from that. Anaerobic digestion, in general, it’s not a new thing. It’s a natural process. It occurs in the muck in the bottom of lakes and rivers all around the world. It’s been harvested or industrialized or engineered, for more than 100 years. In warm climates, in places like India, for instance, been using digesters for more than 100 years around animal manure and human manure.
In the, I’ll say, the civil engineering world, about 50 years ago, discover this as a way to help kill pathogens that were in human sewage sludge from sewage treatment plants. So that began the engineering and the industrialization, so that what occurs for nature for free, everywhere in the world, using engineering principles, we can concentrate that into a tank. We can intensify it. We can make it into a small, fast, controlled process, instead of something that just occurs naturally in the bottom of lakes and rivers. If some debris, animal, dead fish, sinks to the bottom of a river or lake and into the mud. It might biodegrade there anaerobically in nature, but in an anaerobic digester, we can do that in a controlled way. And instead of having that methane that would be produced in in the soil or in the mud at the bottom of a lake or river, there, it would bubble up to the top of the surface of the water and be released to the atmosphere. Now the thing about anaerobic digestion is it does produce methane, and methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. It’s 84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, so it is much, much worse.
Sohail Hasnie: 84 is it? The number we are using, about 22 so things must have changed?
David Ellis: So 22 that has to over a 20 year time horizon. So when we look at the half life of methane in the atmosphere, half life can be on the order of like seven, seven and a half years. When we look over a 20 year time span, it’s actually much more than the 22/24, I’ve seen 28 published as well over different time spans. So the 84 is based on the 20 year time span.
Sohail Hasnie: Okay, so, so with this technology, what could be a typical ten million dollar project?
David Ellis: Typical ten million dollar project, for example, would be, say, a large dairy farm or a large farm that has a livestock plus a portion of food waste from a local, say, apple pie factory, some food manufacturing facility, ice cream factory, cheese plant, those sorts of places, or from source separated organics, municipal waste. So here where I live, we have everyone has a little bin on their kitchen counter, and the banana peels and the onion skins and different material goes in there. So a nice $10 million project, which is actually a pretty good sized digester project, is very simple on farm system, that’s about 50% manure and about 50% food waste. In terms of the tonnage that it could produce, probably, well, it depends if the government’s involved, but if it’s just a private sector job, then I would say we could probably be looking at, at least 20 to 30,000 tons per year of food waste, plus the manure going to that size facility. That would be, that’d be a very good size farm based co digestion application, for instance.
Sohail Hasnie: So how many hectare, 1000 square meter, 100 square meter? Will it need the facility?
David Ellis: Oh, the facilities are relatively small. I have to convert in my head a little bit, acres to hectares. A lot of the farmers in this area still use acres, but I would expect that we’d be looking at just a handful of hectares involved, really, because the anaerobic digester is an intense process that happens inside tanks, much like, say, a greenhouse would be for farming. The physical plot size would be, like one or two hectares for this size facility.
Sohail Hasnie: And then, so you need to have a system to collect all the food waste from different places, including, I guess, some used oil from fries and restaurants, can that be as well?
David Ellis: Yeah, absolutely. The used oil from French fries, and all these, these restaurants are a great fuel source; high calories means high gas potential.
Sohail Hasnie: So they get collected, and then you need electricity or some form of energy to trigger the process right?
David Ellis: The process can be self sustaining pretty easily once it gets going. But yes, to initiate it, we need electricity to pump pumps and to make mixers turn and to operate the mechanical equipment of the thing. The biology likes a certain like a nice, warm temperature, 38 degrees Celsius around that area, so if you’re trying to start a process in the cool season, you need to add some heat to get it to warm up to temperature. And once the biology wakes up and those bacteria spring into action, they start producing the methane, and then it is a energy positive undertaking.
Sohail Hasnie: Then you have to collect the methane,
David Ellis: That’s right.
Sohail Hasnie: Use it somewhere else, like a biogas equivalent. I think a lot of places in Asia, it’s very common, people collect the cow dung and it burns, it’s a similar process, but you’re doing in a large scale, right, correct?
David Ellis: Yes, absolutely. On a small scale, one family a small farm in parts of Asia, you may collect the dung, collect enough gas over the day to cook the dinner for instance. The facilities I’m talking about are commercial scale and industrial scale facilities where you’re talking several hundred or several thousand milking cattle of dairy cattle, for instance, or you’re talking all of the food waste that’s collected in a mid-sized community, say, 500,000 people. And so those types of more industrial applications are definitely things where you collect a significant amount of biogas, the biomethane, and you can have some choices. You can burn that in an engine to make electricity, and some people do that here, or you can purify it to refine biomethane or renewable natural gas to use in the natural gas distribution. And so that’s done more and more in this area as well, where it’s injected into the gas grid.
In Canada, we have plentiful natural gas from our natural oil deposits, and so we have a long-standing natural gas grid across the country and into the United States, and we have gas storage for natural gas. Where we are, in Ontario, near Toronto, we can store an entire winter supply of natural gas in underground salt caverns. If there’s any disruption of the pipeline, it actually doesn’t matter, for six months we can run all winter long with just what is stored locally before the pipelines to Alberta and our oil producing regions are repaired.
Sohail Hasnie: That reminds me of the mid 90s, there is a big disaster in Langford, in Victoria, Melbourne, where we didn’t have gas for more than couple of weeks. The whole state was shut down. I had an electric home, friends were coming for hot showers and dinner. I think you can look it up, I think it happened in Langford, in Victoria, yeah, mid 90s.
David Ellis: I will look that up.
Sohail Hasnie: Yeah, this is one of the largest gas disaster, wow.
So these systems, I mean, $10 million, looks like a large project for a large farm, especially maybe government involved, because you have to also ensure this sufficient feedstock, all sorts of other risk, right? But there could be, at the other end, very small, efficient, one, right, few families, community…
Davie Eilis: Medium size. What we’re seeing now is that the cost of some of the specialized purification equipment can be quite expensive. In terms of the economies of scale, what we’re seeing is the renewable natural gas, so that the gas upgrading equipment, I would call it, the biogas, as it’s produced in the reactor tanks, is about 50% carbon dioxide, about 50% methane. So, 50/50, maybe 60% methane, maybe a little more. But in that range, approximately 50/50, and so that needs to be refined before that can be used in a natural gas grid, a distribution grid that can go to houses or businesses. It becomes the same as any sort of geologic natural gas. Now that upgrading equipment is quite expensive, so we are only seeing that being used now on these large projects, like you said, millions of dollars, $5, $10, $20 million.
We’re now seeing so for example, in 2008 time frame, the City of Toronto embarked on a large digester project that was $75 million and that was for 75,000 tons per year, zero manure, just food waste from the people in the city of Toronto. We are seeing more projects now, so in the hundreds of millions of dollars, $200 million or more capital projects to deal with food waste from major cities across North America, and so these projects, with a tremendous economy of scale, are the ones that are using this upgrading equipment to put the gas that’s produced into the national distribution network. On a much smaller scale, as you say, like one or two families, where we would only inflate a small bladder, sufficient to, as you say, to cook their dinner, or something of that sort. You know, there it’s possible those are very low cost. Of course, they don’t have the, I’ll say, the detailed engineering that a large, complex mechanical system would have to it, they tend to be, certainly, much more simple and easy to operate that way.
Sohail Hasnie: Yeah, because while you are looking at carbon liability perspective, all this food getting wasted and others, of course, we can capture it, avoid emissions, and was you said, and negative emissions in a way, right? You get more tested, but people who do not have remote rural radius of Africa or many part of Asia, so this could be a livelihood issues, right? Because you can cook food with whatever you have.
David Ellis: Absolutely.
Sohail Hasnie: And technology with more efficiency.
David Ellis: Yes, I was in Africa this past summer, and one of the conversations I had was around the use of anaerobic digesters for dairy farming and to improve the lifestyle and income of dairy farmers. These are small farmers where the milk would be collected in small cars or by motorbikes or small jugs like that. And one of the challenges they have in different places is when that milk is brought to the central processing facility, if the electricity is off at that point in time, they’re not able to run the chillers rapidly to cool the milk and to have it stored safely. And so, it’s not a question of energy cost, it’s a question of energy security. The concept that was being discussed was, if the farmers could make their own digester, they can store their own biogas, and when they are ready, they could run the biogas through their engine to make electricity to power the chillers that will cool the milk. And when that cooling process is done, they can stop that mechanical and electrical system and then allow the biogas to slowly fill up in a dome. It would be much like an inflatable dome or bladder system, so we can store that over the night. It can fill up, and they can burn that down for four, six or eight hours during the day, when they need that, as they need the electricity, and they need to be sure they need the electricity at that time and not rely on a local or national grid.
Sohail Hasnie: Interesting. I’m just thinking, because one thing is, this system will have a very long life, right? Unlike batteries and others, because you’re not buying anything from anywhere, right? It will be simple technology, because you’re just storing gas and burning it, right, but you still need a tiny gen set, which is like a diesel sort of gen set, right?
David Ellis: Well, so it would be fired from the biogas itself, the Gen set is, it’s an internal combustion engine, 1/3 electricity, 2/3 of it unfortunately still wasted as heat, as all internal combustion engines. But definitely you’re able to get that electricity you need when you need it, and it’s all under your own control. So you’re self reliant in that way, not the reliant.
And the other folks who, of course, really like this are those who are remotely located, who are not connected to a national grid. If you needed to run 10 or 15 kilometers of high voltage mains, well, that would be a tremendous cost, where you could essentially make yourself off grid, your own little electrical grid island where you provide the feedstock, you produce the gas, you store the gas, and when you need it, you turn on your generators and you make your own electricity.
Sohail Hasnie: Yeah. I mean, now your competition will be the solar Of course, you can get a cooling system in a 20 feet container with solar and batteries of its own. So that’s essentially your competition.
Daivd Ellis: Absolutely
Sohail Hasnie: How does the price stack up? If you want to do a small system, say, equivalent of a 10 kilowatt solar, you can set up everything in a $20,000 so what will $20,000 buy?
David Ellis: Oh, good question. I’ll say clearly, I don’t know exactly for that size of system but let me think about that for a moment. So, there are the industry term “pocket digesters” there’s a shipping container which has in it a plastic bladder bag that would be filled, constructed, concrete base with, wall panels, and inside the wall panels are just erected in one day, a plastic, waterproof plastic liner and a dome, that lid that goes on top, and that’s your digester. And then there’s a mechanical container I’ve seen that goes along with that. Those are not $20,000 so those are, I think, are quite a bit more than that. That would be into, over $100,000 for that type of system. And that would produce, there’s one I can think of in in my area, here in Ontario, I wasn’t involved with the project, but I believe it’s, yes, more than $100,000 and I think the number 25 kilowatt generator is the size that comes to mind, I have to check those details to be sure. So solar and battery may well be, you know, the preferred in that case. It would be to the, the cost of solar, of course, the sun is free, which is fabulous connection, and the batteries absolutely, those are excellent opportunities, the dung, if the farmer has that for free. So, the inputs are free, but of course, the capital of the system is not free. On the storage side, we have, you know, batteries as one storage mechanism, and then we have the methane as a chemical battery, if you will, waiting for us to burn it in the engine, or to use it in some other fashion. What we have seen some projects in Central America, so between North and South America, where the competitor was not solar, but the competitor was actually diesel, so facilities were running diesel powered generators to help power part of a slaughterhouse, for instance. And in that case study, when they’re looking at very expensive electricity, diesel electricity, the biogas system, you know, made a lot of sense for sure, for those instances.
Sohail Hasnie: I mean, diesel cannot compete. It must have been at least five years back
David Ellis: Yes
Sohail Hasnie: Because now the solar so cheap, and batteries so cheap, relatively speaking, of course. Now, diesel will be upwards of 25 to 40 cents a kilowatt hour
David Ellis: This was even more
Sohail Hasnie: Yeah, inventory cost, whereas solar straight maybe five cents, if you had battery, maybe another a few cents, so no competition there. And solar play. Solar will be plug and play. Batteries will be plug and play, right? Doesn’t work, pick it up, get another one, plunk it in. Right?
Davide Ellis: Yes, absolutely. The food waste, the manure, the dung, all these things to make methane. Well, as long as people eat bananas, we’re going to have banana peels, and so there will be that waste disposal. That’s the technical area I’m working, but certainly the truth here is it is as much a waste management tool as it is energy production. The energy piece is the nice cherry on the top. Keeping the waste out of landfills is definitely a key factor.
Because on the energy side, like you said, we at 5,10, 15 cents per kilowatt hour electrical here? That’s what we pay in this part of Canada. At the same time, we have a tipping fee, a gate fee to take the waste to the landfill. So per ton of material, we’ll say round number, about $100 per ton of tipping fee. So now the digester operator, they have two pieces to the business model. They have a tipping fee side for the business, and they have an electrical or energy sales side to the business. They have those two and then there’s the third leg of the stool, which is the digestate. Because right now the phosphorus that we use as fertilizer in farming, phosphorus comes from rocks, it comes from mining. You know, in the 1800s some scientists had thought to dissolve bones using sulfuric acid as a way to make phosphate rich fertilizers. We don’t do that now, we mine phosphate rock, potassium. Mining of potash and ammonia when we talk about ammonia, but that certainly is an issue where ammonia is primarily produced from natural gas, and all of those nutrients, the nitrogen, the phosphorus and the potassium, those are all conserved. Those are all present in the digestate. So, this banana peel goes into the digester it liberates a bunch of energy, and every kilo of nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium that was in that banana peel is still there. It’s still in the digestate, ready to be applied back onto farmland to be grown into next year’s crops.
Sohail Hasnie: Ah, ok. So you can take the NPKs out and make a fertilizer, and you can burn the remaining part anyway, right?
David Ellis: That’s right, yes. So the NPK, is part of the valuation of the end digestate. And so there’s a several different ways to handle that. Some folks are looking at, do we dry material, which is typically very rich in phosphorus, or do we take the whole digestate just as it comes out of wet digester, so this black, mucky material, this kind of stewy mixture? Do we take that and we apply it on the fields, just as the farmers would apply manure in the old days, they just apply digestate and same thing. All the NPKs are still there, and also the organic matter, so the cellulose and the other things can help improve the, I’m going to get into farming here a little bit, which again, out of my depth, but certainly the organic material improves the quality of soil.
There’s been quite a bit of work done by people smarter than me looking at soil health, soil biodiversity, looking at all the little insects and creatures in soil that chemical fertilizer soil produces losses lots of crops, but the digestate fertilized soil has greater markers of biological health and diversity of the microbiome that lives in that soil after the digestate is applied. Definitely improving soil quality as a way to deal with things like helping to mitigate drought, for instance. What are we looking at in terms of that? So a chemical fertilizer does not do all of the same things that the same amount of NPK in a digestate form does.
Sohail Hasnie: Again, this NPK is organic, so you can also feed it to the all the hydroponic farmers, right? Because they’re all using chemical NPKs?
David Ellis: Correct? In my area here, there are several digestates which have been certified for use as inputs to organic farming. So organic certified farms are able to use digestates from certain facilities. Now those facilities have to be careful, a little bit, of what they take in. So certainly, if people have on their curbside organics, if people have plastics in their waste, if they’ve got eggshells, if they have other things that maybe shouldn’t be there, well then they have to go somewhere, either the digester system has some equipment to take that out, or sometime it can actually go through the system and small, little, tiny pieces of plastic and end up on the fields and that’s a problem, for sure. All of all of the farmers that we work with and talk with think about these kinds of things. The farmers understand stewardship, so much better than I’ll say all the MBAs that I’ve met in my life; when I talk to a farmer who is the fourth or fifth or sixth generation of family on the same land, and then in many places in the world, it goes back, Canada’s a pretty young place, certainly in terms of the European involvement here, that farming system, you know, they take stewardship just so much differently – that my father, my grandfather, my great grandfather, plowed this land before me, and if I’m lucky, my kids and grandkids and great grandchildren will plow in the years to come. I am just a steward of this property in this land for a period of time, and nobody wants to be the one who screws it up and has all little bits of plastic and contamination on the farm for the next, you know, 500 years.
One of the things that I’ve seen in discussions about anaerobic digestion and food waste and these things is, can it go wrong? And the answer is, of course, it can. The technology is well established, my old boss, who’s retired now, he was involved in some of the first farm digesters here, more than 40 years ago, in the early 1980s ’81,’82 time frame, and you know, oil price did not skyrocket in those days as people were expecting, right? Oil did not go to $200 a barrel. You know, learned a lot about corrosion of the engines from some of the chemicals in in the food waste, the sulfur compounds, for instance, cause a lot of corrosion. And now those lessons have been learned, and now we understand much better about plastics, we understand about corrosion, we understand about the technical issues. We’re in a in a very good position, I would think, overall, certainly it can be done well and it can be done badly, and I think we’ve seen, unfortunately, we’ve seen both instances in North America. And so right now, I think, though, the key lessons have been learned over the last 30-40, years, and now the systems we’re involved with are much, much better than those, those earlier operations, for sure,
Sohail Hasnie: Absolutely. So I think I was asking the wrong question or thinking in a different way – the electricity generation is a byproduct, but your core is that we are all generating all this waste, how do we sort of minimize that waste going to the landfill? How can we bring it back to the part of our everyday living ecosystem? And it’s better to be done at, not at the residential level, more of a community or a sort of city level, so that you get all the economies of scale and everything else also, it sort of provides continuity of feedstock.
David Ellis: Absolutely the one of the things we look at when we’re looking at risk assessments, for developers, for instance, is exactly that, there’s a small number of pillars we need to have a great project.
One is we have to have reliable feedstock supply, and not just two years or three years or four years, but if we need to guarantee the investment for a 20-year payback period, we need to have a pretty good idea we’re going to have 20 years where the feedstock so that municipal supply is the most guaranteed supply that there is.
We need to have somebody who wants to take the energy that’s produced and whether it’s electrical, whether it’s biogas, whether it’s clean up and use as renewable natural gas, need an off taker on that side.
We need a place to put our digestate, so that typically means land application, who wants the NPK? There are some places where there are so many livestock farms that they don’t actually have enough land base to effectively use all the NPK they have available. They have to truck this a large distance.
Then the fourth and practically the most critical is we need some community acceptance, and so that’s where people legitimately have concerns. Is this thing going to smell bad? Well, if you do it badly, yes, it certainly can. Do you need to do it badly? No, there’s no reason why you should be done badly anymore, these issues have long been solved. Digesters is not a technical risk, the technical issues have been solved, we know how to make a digestive facility that doesn’t smell bad, we humanity, I’ll say in general, the engineering community knows how to do that. We know how to make a tank that doesn’t leak so it doesn’t leak odors, it doesn’t leak methane, that’s pretty well understood. We know how to make an internal combustion engine that’s pretty reliable, we’ve been doing that for a long time as well. These things are all well established, well proven technologies, and we’re just putting them together in new and interesting ways to be able to, like you said, deal with the waste, conserve the NPK so we have some fertilizer value there, and we get to produce energy as well.
Sohail Hasnie: Yes, it’s a very win, win, win. So can you take us through one of your very exciting projects you’re working on, or have done? There must be a lot of exciting projects.
David Ellis: There are a lot of projects now, unfortunately, our most exciting ones are, are still confidential because we get involved because of our small size, we’re not conflicted to large manufacturers of equipment or system, wo we get involved in some eight figure disputes where maybe a project, went sideways in the past, but we can certainly speak to those kinds of issues in general. But I’ll try to get to a specific case.
A specific case where we’re working on is it’s an excellent, excellent opportunity. There’s a very enterprising farmer in the United States who’s looking at understanding how to pair the digester that he has on his farm with his livestock, and to pair that with the amount of land he requires, and to understand how many miles or kilometers radius he needs to go for food and trucking costs to build the business model that is scalable. Because at the end of the day we an above ground, bolted steel tank, right? Pretty much the simplest thing ever from an engineering perspective. And once you have one design, if you make two of these, or you make 100 of these, it really doesn’t matter, you have great economies of scale. And if we can tag, say, 200 milking head of cattle, a fair size, I’ll say for family farm operation with some digesters of, say, 4000 two 4000 cubic meter digester storage tanks themselves, and then with that, add 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 tons per year of food waste at somewhere between $50 and $100 per ton of tipping fee? That’s how the model starts to build out. And then in electrical case, that system you would probably have a 1.5 megawatt electrical kind of scale of production off of that. And then, like I said, all the NPK is conserved, and that material can go back out onto the farm fields.
Looking at that system, we had some questions about, what was, what was the fuel value going to be at the manure? Well surely this has been studied a lot of times there, we don’t actually need to go measure this, this should be from textbooks from 20 years ago, and in some conversations with the developers and the owners, the conversation went something like this: we have three numbers from three different textbooks and they wildly varied, and we had a local party come and take samples, and those are different still again, by double what was in the textbook, and we had a second consultant come out and take a sample, and it was half of the previous value. And we have so many numbers we don’t know what to trust.
And so ended up calling us, and so myself and my colleague, Dr. Michael Nelson, here we went to the site, and as soon as we got there, from our experience, we could tell what had happened. In the farming practices, the cattle would be in the crowd for a period of time, and so they would have a concrete pad that they would stand on it when they were eating. And if you scrape that concrete pad, you would get one quality of manure. And if you scraped outside, where in the sun the manure had been sitting for 10 days in the summer sun. At that point, it was pretty much dirt with no fuel value left in it.
Understanding the sample context was very critical. So doing one sample in the summer and one sample in the winter dramatically different fuel value. So, to that, what we did was we had them scrape the pens clean, and then we timed it. We waited, we’ll come back and sample in exactly 24 hours to simulate full scale farming practices, and 24 hours later, they would come with the big bulldozer blade and push and have this wave of manure, which would have been five meters wide, maybe, and about a meter tall at the front of this blade but it was all less than 24 hours old, and we’re able to then sample that, do a statistical approach to sampling that to get some valid numbers. And we say, okay, this fresh manure, less than 24 hours old, consistently, all year long, will have this quality of gas and the stuff that’s been out baking in the sun for six months that’s just dirt at this point, there’s no fuel left there.
Sohail Hasnie: Okay, with all this knowledge, all these technologies, that’s happening, and thank you, I learned quite a bit about this tech, if I want be an entrepreneur who wants to go in the industry, someone who grew up in the farm, understand this stewardship saying, Okay, I want to do something for the community, where does he or she start? Or what’s your advice for him or her?
David Ellis: The number one is people, right? This energy or waste, this is a people business. And so, like I mentioned, that the key things you need is you need to secure feedstock supply. That means you need to have good, strong relationships with the people who own and manage your local food factories, the people who manage the restaurants who have the French fry oil, you need to have good relationships there so that you can have guaranteed feedstock supply, that’s critical.
On the other side, you need to have good, strong relationships with your local farmers, because these are the people who will have enough hectares of land and grow enough crops, whatever the crops are, whether it’s hay or maize or what have you, whatever those crops are that you have a permanent outlet for your digestate, because you need to have the inlet feedstock, you need to have the outlet digestate.
The people who can develop those two strong relationships can then be the bridge, right? The business developers in this space, the entrepreneurs, they’re the pipeline people, they’re the bridges. Bridging the inlet to the outlet, and then the third bridge is to the off takers. So that would be the folks who are interested in purchasing your energy, your natural gas or electricity. What do they need? When do they need it? How much do they need?
And then the fourth bridge then has to be to the community, because we know that these systems should work well, they’re engineered well, they work well, they don’t smell this, not an issue in that way. But in the past, some have, and so there’s a little bit of that reputation that you need to have a strong relationship. You need to build some trust with the community so that, I can point to 10 examples that are close to communities and don’t smell at all and don’t have older complaints, but everyone else can probably point to 10 facilities that were designed poorly, operated poorly, and smell terrible. And both are factual representations of what really happened. So then how do we know that you’re going to build your system and manage your system away, not to cut costs that might result in some oversight that smells bad, but you’re going to take good care of this as a piece of our community for the long term? So it’s those four bridges that the entrepreneurs need to put together, feedstock, digestate, power off taking and the community. If you can, if you can make that triangle, or, sorry, that that diamond shape, you know, all those four corners together, then I think you really got something.
Sohail Hasnie: Wonderful, wonderful. What else you do for fun? I mean, you’re very big into this topic, anything else you want to do in a personal life, or anything else I could have asked you want to share?
David Ellis: Well, I’m happily a father of three strapping sons who are just launching themselves into their university careers at this point, my wife and I are, we’re empty nesters now for two months. It’s a very strange situation at home. There’s ourselves, our dog, but the house is pretty big, right? It’s pretty big when the kids are all off at university, for sure.
So, we’ve been traveling some as well, because I was in Africa, in in Europe, in Ireland, you know, in the past little while as well. So, I would love to actually come to come to your neck of the woods, whether it’s, you know, Philippines, Manila, down into Australia, you know, South Asia, Asia, all of these places I’ve never been to that place. I’ve worked Europe and Africa. I’ve worked in North America, worked across South America. This is one piece of the world I’ve never been to, though, so this would be my goal in my personal life, for sure.
Sohail Hasnie: Interesting, because I have worked in Australia and all over Asia except one or two countries, and not Africa or Europe, I’ve just visited. So, it’s interesting. Our two worlds are very, very different.
David Ellis: It is. My colleague, Trisha, who you may see her on our YouTube channel, she does a lot of work with our training and educational work that we’re doing. She’s originally from the Philippines, and she moved to Canada when she was, I think, 11 years old, and has a lot of family there and looks to go back, so certainly that’s on the list as well we’ll be making the right business trips all around that part of the world for sure, coming up.
Sohail Hasnie: Thank you very much, David for your time. I hope this was useful.
David Ellis: It was very interesting, I enjoyed it tremendously, and hopefully we can talk again sometime, Sohail. Really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.
Sohail Hasnie: Thank you.