CAFO Waste to Fuel Indiana?
Reports are coming in from Frankfort, Indiana about the results of a study commissioned by Clinton County on the feasibility of converting how waste into power:
The report delivered to county commissioners and council members on Monday was the result of an eight-month, $75,000 study paid for by the city of Frankfort, Clinton County and the federal government.
The plan would hinge on a $5.5 million biorefinery that would convert waste piped in from hog farms into methane gas and carbon dioxide gas. The gases would power generators that would send power back to the farms and homes, said Gina Sheets, economic development director for the Clinton County Chamber of Commerce.
Link (Star Press).
I wonder if these guys have found something better that what Marcia reported on in this story in the Indiana Law Blog on a California plan to turn pig manure into power that may have sounded good on paper, but:
With a folksy delivery, the Orange County businessman promised cutting-edge technology, a respected engineering firm and tax-exempt financing to extract methane gas from mountains of manure and use it to generate enough power to light a small city.
"He told me categorically that we would get our money back with interest and that the project was as good as gold," said Shmuel Erde, a Beverly Hills lender.
What Moriarty and his business partner, Wayne Stephens, didn’t tell Erde and numerous others who altogether invested more than $10 million was that their company, Chino Organic Power Inc., had no licensed technology, no equipment, no permits — not even a guaranteed supply of manure.
Although manure-to-electricity plants have been used on a small scale to turn water-polluting cow waste into power, they are not particularly cost-effective and have never produced close to the amount of electricity Moriarty envisioned, documents and interviews show.
(Quote from a story in the LA Times)
There are lots of people producing electricity out of manure today. The trouble is doing it on a large scale and making it cost effective. A livestock producer can purchase a digester for about $300,000 that will produce enough electricity to power about 75 homes, enough to power a small livestock operation and still have some electricity left over to sell. However, while such a system might work well in some operations, as the manure digesters use bacteria to break down the manure into methane, manure produced by livestock dependent on antibiotics will not work as the antibiotics kill off the bacteria. (Reference: Farm Credit Canada: Manure to Electricity). There are lots of projects already in operation using biogas (like the Dairyland Power Cooperative using landfill gases and Canada’s IMUS pilot program: IMUS: Integrated Manure Utilization System (PDF)), but most of these large scale projects take major government grants/investment, as the cost per megawatt out paces traditional plants (coal, nuclear) (Source: Fifth Power Plan Summary and Action Plan (PDF) estimating cost at $60 per megawatt-hour).
Fibrowatt a UK based company is building a huge 50 megawatt facility in Minnesota to generate electricity from incinerating poultry waste. This would be the 1st US plant for the company, and it too is being touted as a "green" source of electricity, but not everyone is happy with this method.
