(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
Saratoga Biochar CEO Ray Apy speaks to the Moreau Town Planning Board.
The Town of Moreau Planning Board took about two hours of public testimony from dozens of speakers and then tapped the brakes on the Saratoga Biochar project that the board has been considering since last May.
The Biochar facility proposed for the Moreau Industrial Park would take dried biosolids from wastewater and agricultural waste and turn it into fertilizer in a process known as pyrolysis.
About 70 people attended the meeting which considered only this project. The vast majority of people spoke against it and inundated the board with data that they said proved their point that not enough was known about the process that Saratoga Biochar would employ at the plant.
Given the amount of data and the public feedback, the board considered rescinding their initial favorable environmental review, but ultimately decided to consider hiring an independent expert to help them in the site plan review of the project. The board’s next step will be to give the town’s Zoning Administrator Jim Martin a list of topics and concerns that they would like a the expert to consider. He will turn that into a request for proposals by their June meeting.
The vote to rescind the environmental review failed 4 to 2, while the vote to consider the hiring expert passed unanimously, about three hours after the meeting began.
The project is moving into the site plan review phase, and this is where an expert may help the board consider environmental issues and use of the property. The board could still rescind the favorable environmental review if the expert brings data to light that would bring the environmental review into question, the town attrorney Karla Buettner siad.
Speakers against the project ran the gamut of issues from noise to health to water and sewer usage, to general questions about quality of life.
They cited other concerns given the history of industrial plants such as Ciba-Geigy and General Electric that were powerhouses of economic development but left superfund cleanup sites when they moved from the area or shutdown.
Most focused on the idea that the board relied on the company’s description of the activity when considering the environmental review, but many who spoke said they wanted an independent expert to look at it.
“This has a lot of ‘ifs’,” said Tom Mahony, who lives near the park. He worried about quality of life both in terms of the air quality and the noise of turbines running all week.
Matt Boucher, superintendent of the Putnam Central Schools, wondered about the number of trucks running along the roads and the affects that the company's water usage would have on the sewer line.
Many people wondered about odors, what happens in case of spills and who is monitoring all of the activity.
As the applicant on the project, Saratoga Biochar CEO Ray Apy was given the final opportunity to speak. He reiterated what the company has been saying all along.
The company uses the dried biosolids from wastewater. They are solids and trucked in as solids on covered trucks, Apy said, adding that the waste is little different than manure which is trucked around this area all the time. The solids under New York State Department of Environmental Conservation guidelines are not a biohazard and a spill can be cleaned with shovels, he said.
Trucks will not line up on streets or on site, he said. And they dump their cargo in below-ground sealed cement, covered containers inside the building.
The building itself is pressurized to force all indoor air out through filters.
The process of converting the solid to fertilizer does not burn the solids, Vice President Bryce Meeker said. The solids are heated in a low oxygen environment so that they do not burn. Gas is produced and heated to a temperature that breaks down compounds such as the PFAS that have worried people, and then the gas is burned, and the heat created helps in the drying process, Meeker said.
The remaining solids become the fertilizer, and the entire process is filtered for air and water quality.
They do use a lot of water, and the planning board questioned whether or not the waste water produced can be handled by the sewer system as is.