Manure-to-energy

Between declining farmland, and new regulations that require it be spread thin enough to not run off...no place to put the chicken stuff.

Few poultry farms left, I assume these guys are around due to corporate $$$ backing them -- I know the retired egg farmers in the area I know shake their heads saying they couldn't have bought the grain for the price they see eggs selling for at the grocery store:

Manure: A Fowl Energy Concept

Plan Would Put An Endless Supply To A Powerful Use August 10, 2006
By MARK PETERS, Courant Staff Writer It's not as simple as flushing the toilet for nearly 5 million chickens at Kofkoff Egg Farm.

The 340 tons of manure dropped each day have become a growing problem for one of New England's largest egg-laying operations, causing state officials to worry about Kofkoff's future in Connecticut.

So the owners of the farm and Clearview Power are proposing a radical solution - using heat to turn chicken manure mixed with wood into enough electricity to power as many as 29,000 average homes.

The process is largely untested in the United States for chicken waste, and the power plant planned for Bozrah - the farm's main location - needs state subsidies and permits before construction can start.

But supporters, including the state Department of Agriculture, see this biomass project as a way to bring renewable energy to the state, while keeping an eastern Connecticut farm open.

"If you don't solve these problems, the farm may be forced to leave," said Jim Potter, president of Clearview Power, a New Hampshire-based company developing the plant.

Judd Everhart, a spokesman for Gov. M. Jodi Rell, said many details need to be ironed out, but there is widespread support in the state for the project.

"Kofkoff is an important employer in eastern Connecticut, and we will make every effort to make this proposed renewable energy project a reality," Everhart said.

The problem for Kofkoff starts with the state's continuing shift away from agriculture.

The closure of farms - and their replacement with housing subdivisions - reduces the number of fields where Kofkoff can spread its manure. Dairy farms traditionally take chicken manure to fertilize fields for hay and corn.

At the same time, new federal regulations are placing limits on the amount of manure a farm can spread. The rules are meant to keep excess nutrients from ending up in lakes, rivers and bays. There, they can cause high amounts of algae growth, choking water habitats.

To comply with these regulations, dairy farms have to cut back on the amount of chicken waste they use, said Joseph Wettemann, a senior sanitary engineer for the state Department of Environmental Protection.

So with fewer places to put chicken manure, Kofkoff has to find new ways to dispose of its constant stream of waste.

"This manure-to-energy plant is our best shot right now," Wettemann said.

Without a quick solution, state and local officials say, the farm could shrink, move - or just close.

An analysis by the state Department of Economic and Community Development found that Kofkoff contributes about $160 million annually to the state's economy. Its closure would cause egg prices to rise and put 300 employees out of work.

At this point, the biomass plant is the only viable solution to dispose of the chicken waste, state officials said.

Neither Kofkoff Egg Farm nor its parent company, Minnesota-based agro-giant Land O' Lakes Inc., returned calls for comment this week.

The "gasifying" of chicken manure is largely untested in the United States, and experts say it's too expensive to do without subsidies. Clearview Power says it will need a ratepayer-subsidized contract, which requires utilities to buy power for the grid from the biomass plant, Potter said.

On a daily basis, the plant would mix manure with waste wood such as tree trimmings, palettes and lumber. That mixture would go into a boiler, where it would burn partially under high heat to create gas.

That gas would burn to produce heat for a steam boiler. Most of the steam would turn a generator to produce 29 megawatts of electricity for the regional power grid. The farm would use the remaining steam to heat its buildings, Potter said.

Clearview Power says the ash waste from the wood and manure could be sold as organic fertilizer.

The process of turning biomass into energy is becoming more common in the United States, especially as the country tries to move away from foreign-supplied fossil fuels.

Energy Products of Idaho, which manufactures equipment for biomass plants, has worked, for example, on about 100 plants in the United States and abroad. The largest is a 65-megawatt plant in California that burns agricultural waste, including straw and tree trimmings, said LeRoy Pope, the company's general manager.

In New England, states are looking at several proposals for biomass plants, including ones that burn waste wood alone. But experts say chicken waste is a new material for the region - and possibly the whole country.

Philip Shepherd, a senior project leader at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, said the common way to use animal waste for energy is through a process known as anaerobic digestion. It uses a biological process to produce gases from the waste that is then used as fuel.

Clearview Power researched the use of chicken waste in the United Kingdom, using experiences there to help plan its project in Bozrah.

The company has started to build support in town for the proposed power plant.

Bozrah First Selectman Keith J. Robbins said something has to be done to address Kofkoff's waste problem. He says the company has done a good job in recent years controlling the smell, and doesn't see the new plant causing additional odor problems. His only major concern is the traffic from trucks used to bring the waste wood.

"I feel very comfortable with what I have seen and heard so far," Robbins said.

The project has early support from some environmentalists as well. The plant would provide a renewable energy source that is cleaner than fossil fuels burned at Connecticut power plants right now, said Derek Murrow, director of policy analyst for Environment Northeast, a regional group focused on energy, air quality and climate change.

He added that burning the manure would reduce the emission of methane, which is a greenhouse gas.

The next step for the plant is selling it to the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund and the public.

Potter plans to outline the project to state lawmakers during an energy summit in Hartford today.

Next week, Clearview Power will file an application with the clean energy fund for a long-term contract to sell its electricity to the grid at an above-market rate.

The project did not win a contract in the first round of bidding earlier this year.

Finally, the project needs public support in eastern Connecticut, where it is largely unknown.

We need a property tax break.

Yeah, my big white butt. But the corporations have all the dumb governments bending over to pork over cash to them for no real reason.

Lots of time, it's silly. Lowes threatened they could get a better deal from RI then CT for a distribution center. You're not going to build in South Carolina a warehouse for southern New England. CT's Governor should've gotten on the phone to MA & RI Governors and conferenced in Lowe's to tell them to pound sand.

Instead of them at least paying all their taxes to one state, CT gave them the discounts they wanted. Governor's aides probably collected a nice share (and that's part of our problem -- Governor Rowland was only a *petty* thief, he got busted for stuff like hot tubs. It was his mid-level aids that made off with the good $$$)

Call it a subsidy.

Call it a tax break.

Until you get some sense into the states, it's the way it works.

Charles

No only does corn growing garner large subsidies and price supports from the Federal government, there are further special subsidies for conversion to ethanol and blending with gasoline. Senator Bill Bradley has stated that this amounts to a billion dollar tax break, largely flowing to one company (ADM).

The EPA has conveniently banned MTBE and pushed ethanol for use in oxygenated fuels.

I suspect it is no accident that Dwayne Andreas and his firm Archer Daniels Midland have been major contributors to presidential and senatorial campaigns. ADM produces more than 60 percent of the ethanol being added to gasoline.

And before anyone waves the "energy independence" flag, the studies on net energy balance for ethanol production are not particularly favorable. When they consider tractor fuel, fertilizer, distillation, and distribution, it may take as much or more energy to produce the ethanol as the ethanol generates when it is burned.

Manure-to-energy plants have a much more favorable energy balance picture, and disposition of the waste has to be accomplished anyway, if people want to eat chicken or eggs.

Contrast this with corn that is grown for ethanol production. This is a completely discretionary crop, and the fields could just as easily be left fallow or used for something else, such as, perhaps, soybeans for biodiesel.

Pooh Bear
(Ol' Fluff For Brains)

NO NO NO!

Methanol is toxic, low energy, corrosive. It does NOT come from corn. It does NOT make a good fuel. (Comes from wood in the old days, petro products these days.)

We get ETHANOL from corn (or sugarbeets).

Big, big, big difference. I see this mistake all the time.

Methanol is the basis for MTBE, and is bad.

Ethanol is a very different thing, and what gets cooked out of sugar mash. Please don't contune the nasty mis-information about this. Please!

As to the source for the sugars, looks like 10 years from now the low-content, but huge volume stems aka lignens (grasses, cornstalks, wood waste, etc) will out-preform corn or s-beets. These 'crops' can grow about anywhere for cheap, & often are a waste product not being used, so will be more efficient once they get the enzymes & processes worked out. The huge volume of waste they create can be used to fire the plant, thus reducing the need for any outside energy source. Can be made to be very, very efficient on paper - now they need to make it work out that way in the real world.

Corn grows all across the country, is in stable supply, the 17 lbs of 'waste' from fermenting a bu of corn makes great animal feed, corn stores for over a year very easily, and thus it works out to the best bet 'right now'.

S-beets are a great sugar source, but it is a rather fragile crop, requiring near-perfect soils (relatively small # of acres suited for raising them), and a great deal of insect & fungus control - very $$$ to get a crop. Which doesn't store very well, to be honest. In short, it takes a _lot_ to make a good crop of s-beets. This hurts the overall efficiency of the deal, to marginalize their use in the USA for such an industrial product as fuel. Just not dependable enough.

Even the sugar buyers have turned from beets to corn fructose when liquid sugar is needed - just an easier crop to deal with - dependability leads to lower prices.

'Round here chicken manure is way too valuable for fertilizer to not use it for that - each area to their own I guess! :)

--->Paul

I thought sugar beets could be grown anywhere.
I do know they have to be used ASAP after being harvested.
I actually know very little about sugar beets.

Yep, High Fructose Corn Syrup has replaced sugar
in just about all (if not all) soft drinks in the USA.

The History Channel had a show a while back on the
history of sugar and talked about Brazil and sugar
beets and high fructose corn syrup.

Pooh Bear

Interestingly, just googled the numbers...Ok, going off only a single reference, but it says ethanol per acre is twice as much for sugar beets over corn. Hmmm...I wonder if I can grow them in Connecticut...

If we do move forward on a major basis with ethanol, I would think in time we'd develop even better plants. Would be interesting to see sugar cane growing in Iowa :) Or at least developing a really rich Sorghum or something.

Beets don't like wet feet, don't like dry sand, rocky soil makes harvest difficult, they are subject to lots of disease buildup in the soil after a few years, they are very fussy to herbicides in the soil, and so on. Just a very fragile, fussy crop.

On paper beets get you more sugar per acre; but in the real world in the USA, corn gets you a cheaper gallon of ethanol after the dust settles.

As I said in the other message, you might be going the wrong way. On paper these days by far the most efficient way to go is with very low sugar-content woody crops. Will take a few years to figure out the proper reciepe & cooker design, but the potential is there right now. The ethanol pencils out much cheaper per gallon - and _that_ is all that counts, not raw sugar content per se.

Other countries like Brazil, the numbers pencil out differently, & beets work well (corn does not grow well in their country) - down there. Different ballpark up here. Gotta use the rules nature gave us.

Along the same vein, my BiL wants to grow sorgum up here in MN, because he read somewhere that it yields 2x as much ethanol as anything else.

Sigh. Maybe in a dry western state that is very true. Ain't no way it is here in Minnesota tho. Got to go with what mother nature deals you, & look at the whole picture. Don't know if you can even _get_ a grain crop from sorgum up here in this wet cold climate, and wonderful if the whole green plant is full of sugar - how the heck do you store that reasonably on the farm? Sigh.

Corn works best - for now, in most of the USA.

I think that will change tho.

--->Paul

The government provides sugar price supports, (much to the consternation of the WTO). These sugar price supports raise the cost of sugar, which in turn raises the appeal of high fructose corn syrup as an alternative to sugar. Most processed food uses corn syrup as a sweetener because it is cheaper than sugar after the price supports are factored in.

This provides an indirect subsidy to Archer Daniels Midland by keeping demand up for corn for use as a sweetener, as well as for distillation into ethanol, and (oh yeah) sometimes used as grain for cattle and people feed.

While sugar beets might give better yield per acre, the real winner for ethanol production would be something that is otherwise very easy to grow (like grasses) or a waste product, like forestry slash, or straw. There has been recent progress in finding ways to "digest" cellulose into fermentable starch and thence sugar. This direction might improve the energy balance and economic yield of ethanol as a fuel.

No discussion of energy balance should leave out the global warming implications. Use of ethanol as a fuel, even with an optimistic 30% positive energy balance, means the generation of 2.3 times as much CO2 per end-user BTU (compared to straight gasoline) unless all the energy used in production of the ethanol comes from somewhere other than carbon based fuels. Such "carbon multipliers", while they might let us drive a little longer than the finite oil supply would otherwise allow, will only hasten the day when much of the planet is uninhabitable.

All that's happened is effectively companies are hitting a glass ceiling -- big enough to control pricing, to big to grow anymore without finally getting a hand-slap. So they can get comfortable knowing no one, even their "competitors" can now challenge them.

Figure if I could do just 600 gallons / acre.

Multiply by 60% to gas the equivelant in straight gasoline..360 gallons.

That's about a 1/4 of what I use in fuel a year right now...at $3/gallon (paid $3.13 tonite)...that's over $1000.

Have plenty of cordwood to heat a still...couple used 275 gallon fuel oil tanks could hold a year's production...

Hmmm, might have an excuse for buying a cultivate for the Ferguson ;)

The 22 farmer owned and one ADM owned ethanol plants are getting 2.9 gallons of ethanol per bu of corn.

Real, real close to your numbers????

You will find raising, harvesting, & storing corn to be _much_ easier, I think.

Not discouraging you, just think through all the options. :)

--->Paul

Which is growing a root crop.

In typical upland New England soils.

You know, the place of the country famous for it's...Stone Walls.

That ain't gonna happen on a big scale.

I was thinking they'd be easier to process then corn...I wonder now though if you'd be able to just pick an ear and chop it and make the mash with the cob, kernel, and husk

Just be cool to do...unfortunately, if you got it to work, you couldn't even brag about brewing your own fuel less the revenuers get wind of it!

Another fuel source these days - rendering plants. Getting hard to use the stuff they get for feed or anything any more - they can render the grease into fuel tho, again 40 miles or so from me is one of the few rendering plants left, they are making bio-diesel.

As a farmer, would seem more efficient/ lower cost to keep the cobs & husks seperate - less material to collect; or use the cobs for bedding & the husks for cattle feed instead of flowing all the extra material through the process.

Efficiency at low cost is the way to go farming. 'Easy' never seems to make a farmer any money. :)

--->Paul

I suppose if you had a one or two row picker you'd have the cat's meow for that application. But I'm solidly in silage country -- you don't see pickers, and you don't see cribs around here.

The studies that said it was negative are pretty much discredited -- they included the input of the sun.

One generally accepted "spreadsheet" that produces a 38% net gain in BTUs out over in...of 27,000 BTUs to grow the corn, 12,000 went to Fertlizer, and 7,000 to Irrigation. Only 2,000 to tillage and harvest.

I don't know if the irrigation was "worse case" only for places that irrigate, or if it was averaged so it's allocated even to places that don't use it.

But that doesn't matter really -- you can easily use a fossil fuel for irrigation. Can you say Windmill? Either direct pump, or too generate electricity.

In making alcohol, they use a lot of BTUs in the form of steam. But if you build a plant that is trash-to-energy incinerator, that then uses the steam to make electricity, then the steam they where making anyway goes on to heat the still...how do you account for steam that would've gone unused?

Fertilizer you can count a couple ways. One, you could reduce it. So maybe between needing more land and using crop rotations for N, you use 4,000 extra BTUs in the tractor to save 12,000 BTUs in fertilizer...not a bad gain. OTOH, most fertlizer is made from natural gas...most cars burn liquid fuel, not NG. So do you count it as converting the NG to an automobile usable form :)

Anyway, we won't replace gasoline with Ethanol. Probably not enough land. But you know, 20% or 30% could make a difference.

While some people are real rosy on their numbers, I wouldn't believe the ones who say it takes more energy to make it because they're being just unrealistically conservative in their numbers.