Portable Burner to Clean Canada's Arctic

Leaking or corroded fuel containers are an environmental hazard in any region of the country, but pose a particularly serious threat in fragile ecosystems like the Arctic. Yet numerous drums of degraded diesel and other waste fuels once used to power generators, vehicles and other equipment on the North Warning System are stored in various remote locations throughout northern Canada.

How to safely dispose of this unusable or "off-specification" fuel—much of which has been contaminated by sediment and water—has proven a difficult challenge. Flying the heavy containers to a southern facility where their contents could be burned-off or "flared" at a high temperature would be a tremendous financial expense, and leaks in the aging containers could make transport difficult or dangerous.

In searching for a solution to the problem, the Department of National Defence approached Environment Canada's Environmental Technology Centre (ETC) about the possibility of designing a burner that could flare the fuel on site. The ETC engineers had some difficult requirements to meet. First, because the sites involved were remote, the unit had to be portable by helicopter—a considerable feat, given that most industrial burners are very large, permanent pieces of equipment. Second, it had to be capable of burning-off about one barrel of fuel per hour, so that each job could be completed within a one-day shift, as the sites were no longer equipped for an overnight stay.

The designers came up with the concept for a dual unit, each burner consisting of a commercially available burner head and a refractory-lined stainless-steel drum. Each unit is designed to be flown to a site in pieces, and can be assembled in half an hour using basic hand tools. The unit looks like an elongated soup can about three metres long and more than a metre across, with a burner head at one end and a heat deflector at the other. The head, which was originally developed for use in boilers, shoots swirling flames into the burner to help break up water droplets and ensure the complete combustion of fuel that might not otherwise burn cleanly. This process, combined with the high heat reflected by its liner, results in fewer pollutants in the emissions.

The unit has already been tested at the ETC laboratory using both fresh diesel fuel and off-specification jet fuel from the nearby Ottawa International Airport. Emissions tests confirmed a smokeless, clean burn, with both carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide emission levels comparably low for both fuels. The dual burner was recently shipped to a remote site in the Arctic, where it will be field tested next summer, when weather conditions are at their most favourable. If all goes as planned, the unit could be in full operation throughout the North soon after.

The portable burner developed by Environmental Technology Centre staff to flare waste fuel stored in remote locations.

This state-of-the-art technology, developed using relatively inexpensive, off-the-shelf components, will help to reduce the threat of environmental contamination by enabling the safe and efficient clean-up of potentially hazardous fuel depots at remote sites in Arctic Canada, and perhaps elsewhere in the world.

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