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You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Alternative Power Plant Is A Double Waste

Alternative Power Plant Is A Double Waste

by Tim F|  June 6, 20079:13 am| 22 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology

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Credit to the New York Times for adding some perspective to another outside-the-box energy idea, but methinks they miss an important point.

Thanks to the abundance of local droppings, Benson is home to a new $200 million power plant that burns turkey litter to produce electricity. For the last few weeks now, since before generating operations began in mid-May, turkey waste has poured in from nearby farms by the truckload, filling a fuel hall several stories high.

[…] Critics say turkey litter, of all farm animals’ manure, is the most valuable just as it is, useful as a rich, organic fertilizer at a time when demand is growing for all things organic. There is a Web site devoted to detailing the alleged environmental wrongs at the power plant, which detractors consider just another pollutant-spewing, old-technology incinerator dressed up in green clothing.

A related issue is that the electricity is expensive, as called for in a utility contract that led to the plant’s construction, and that it requires a lot of input for a rather small output. Marty Coyne of Platts Emissions Daily, a newsletter that analyzes issues related to the energy markets, said it would take 10 waste-burning plants the size of the one here to equal the energy generated by one medium-size coal-fired plant.

David Morris, vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an advocacy group with offices in Minneapolis and Washington, said: “As a matter of public policy, it stinks. The problem is that it’s using a resource in an inefficient way, and required huge subsidies to create a more inferior product than what was already being sold on the market.”

In a sense the inefficiency issue is the least of the problems with burning turkey droppings to make power. Non-renewable energy sources won’t stay cheap forever, so it seems like a perfectly good idea to work out the kinks in whatever renewable sources we can find while power and raw materials are still dirt cheap. When the fuel crunch hits the cost of testing and developing new energy ideas will skyrocket just like everything else. Rather, the problem is that better and more efficient ways to turn droppings into power already exist.

By late this year, Akron hopes to be turning sewage sludge into electricity.

The city and KB Compost Services Inc. began construction in September of a $7 million plant — the first of its kind in the United States — that will rely on bacteria to feed on sludge to produce a gas that can power an electric generator.

The new facility is similar to about 200 plants in Europe and Asia developed by a German company, Schmack Biogas AG.

The basic biogas plant ferments humid organic waste in large anaerobic tanks and puts out rich, sterile fertilizer and methane gas which can be tapped and burned for power. Studies have found that dairy farms can run a power surplus from their own cattle waste without losing the fertilizer benefit, and the system pays for its own startup and maintenance within six years. An even more sensible approach, popular in India, pools the investment in a central plant that collects waste from nearby farms.

For the life of me I will never understand why cities pay good money to import power and to manage waste when the one could help pay for the other. It makes no more sense than the two or three dozen ignored technologies (dear Flagstaff – ever heard of leaky hose irrigation?) which could prolong our time on this blue marble indefinitely.

To illustrate my point, in parts of Colorado the stink from hog farms makes life practically unlivable. North Carolina rivers swell with hog waste on good days and drown in giant floods of the stuff when lagoon dams burst, yet the problem has no need to exist. With a token investment hog farms could have zero waste issues and an electricity bill that pays them money. The same inertia which leads turkey farmers to burn their droppings when they could put out far less CO2 for the same power output and get back good fertilizer works everywhere and every day to ensure that for every ten barrels of oil pumped out of the ground, we piss nine away needlessly.

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22Comments

  1. 1.

    chopper

    June 6, 2007 at 9:49 am

    what i love is that broke-ass villagers in central america use large plastic tubes, ditches and buckets to turn their own poop (and that of their livestock) into biogas for cooking and good humus, but people in the US haven’t figured it out.

  2. 2.

    Dreggas

    June 6, 2007 at 10:02 am

    That’s just bull shit, or turkey shit in this case.

    (Sorry had to.)

  3. 3.

    Tim F.

    June 6, 2007 at 10:05 am

    what i love is that broke-ass villagers in central america use large plastic tubes, ditches and buckets to turn their own poop (and that of their livestock) into biogas for cooking and good humus, but people in the US haven’t figured it out.

    In other words, the villagers can’t afford to be stupid.

  4. 4.

    Rome Again

    June 6, 2007 at 10:19 am

    Damn, Dreggas, you stole part of my post. ::THWACK!::

    Turkey droppings? Are we going to be the nation known to get our energy from turkeys? Bulls are so much more appropriate.

  5. 5.

    Ben

    June 6, 2007 at 10:21 am

    Who run Barter Town? Master Blaster.

  6. 6.

    Mr Furious

    June 6, 2007 at 10:32 am

    Quit yer bitchin’ Tim, any day now all our problems will be solved by free Iraqi crude…

  7. 7.

    Tim H.

    June 6, 2007 at 10:50 am

    With a token investment hog farms could have zero waste issues and an electricity bill that pays them money.

    Hardly. Municipal waste treatment systems for medium cities cost tens of millions. Schemes like this would double or triple it. This is way too much investment for any farm or small city.

  8. 8.

    Tim F.

    June 6, 2007 at 10:56 am

    This is way too much investment for any farm or small city.

    First, the power aspect alone pays for itself over a short time span. Second, municipal and hog farm applications would dramatically alleviate the costs of waste management. Unless you shrink the meaningful time horizon to six months I have a very hard time seeing how biogas cannot be feasible.

  9. 9.

    Badtux

    June 6, 2007 at 11:08 am

    Just a FYI, if you’re talking soaker hoses and Flagstaff AZ, they don’t last long with Arizona water. Too heavily mineralized. On the hardness scale used by water softener companies, Arizona water is about six feet off the top of the scale. I used drip irrigation for my trees and shrubs when I lived in Arizona and needed to remove the nozzles and plop them in vinegar twice a year to keep them from clogging. You can’t do that with a soaker hose!

    As for Tim H, yes, municipal waste treatment systems, whether for hog farms or cities, are expensive. The added cost to capture the gasses they emit is an insigificant percentage of the total cost of the waste system with all its sludge pumps, fermentation tanks, sprayers, etc., not to mention that it can decrease the cost of the deodorants needed to make the plant semi-palatable to the neighbors (in my opinion all the deodorants do is make the shit smell like perfumed shit, but …shrug). As for landfills, they’re re-working the old landfills around here to collect the gasses. It’s not that big an expense, the only reason it wasn’t profitable in the past was because of the low cost of natural gas, but with natural gas prices going up it’s pretty much a no-brainer.

  10. 10.

    ThymeZone

    June 6, 2007 at 11:21 am

    for every ten barrels of oil pumped out of the ground, we piss nine away needlessly.

    True. If we could just get rid of the government that started out with a “conservation is for pussies” attitude, we’d be way ahead.

  11. 11.

    tBone

    June 6, 2007 at 11:23 am

    To illustrate my point, in parts of Colorado the Midwest the stink from hog farms makes life practically unlivable. North Carolina Midwestern rivers swell with hog waste on good days and drown in giant floods of the stuff when lagoon dams burst, yet the problem has no need to exist.

    Fixed for general applicability. Also, as I was reminded repeatedly while growing up, it’s not “stink,” it’s the smell of money. And electricity, I guess, once the shit-to-shinola conversion process is perfected.

    On the hardness scale used by water softener companies, Arizona water is about six feet off the top of the scale.

    This is God’s way of telling you to stop irrigating a desert.

  12. 12.

    Andrew

    June 6, 2007 at 11:33 am

    Carolina ain’t in no uppity ass midwest, foo.

    We’re right proud of our very own Southern-style hog waste disasters.

    And we’ve got the most pigs by far. Suck it, Iowa, suck it.

  13. 13.

    tBone

    June 6, 2007 at 11:50 am

    Carolina ain’t in no uppity ass midwest, foo.

    I just included you out of pity. No one from the South seemed anxious to step up and claim you.

    And we’ve got the most pigs by far. Suck it, Iowa, suck it.

    Burrrrrnnnn!

  14. 14.

    The Other Steve

    June 6, 2007 at 12:14 pm

    Just a FYI, if you’re talking soaker hoses and Flagstaff AZ, they don’t last long with Arizona water. Too heavily mineralized. On the hardness scale used by water softener companies, Arizona water is about six feet off the top of the scale. I used drip irrigation for my trees and shrubs when I lived in Arizona and needed to remove the nozzles and plop them in vinegar twice a year to keep them from clogging. You can’t do that with a soaker hose!

    When are you guys going to realize you live in a frickin desert and stop trying to grow trees?

  15. 15.

    Tim H.

    June 6, 2007 at 12:16 pm

    First, the power aspect alone pays for itself over a short time span.

    Numbers, please. A gas power plant requires $500/kw of investment for a 1000kw size. Add to that the gas purification that would be required for landfill or digester gas, I’d guess that would be about $100/kw for an amine system. Add to that the anaerobic digesters and the piping system.

    Since regular natural gas power plants run about 10-15 year payback now your system would probably be in the neighborhood of 20-25 years at a guess. Windmills are a whole lot cheaper.

  16. 16.

    The Other Steve

    June 6, 2007 at 12:22 pm

    And we’ve got the most pigs by far. Suck it, Iowa, suck it.

    That’s hard to believe. Back in the late 1990s Iowa had like 4 times as many hogs as North Carolina.

    Has it changed that much since? I suppose. My uncle in Iowa got out of the business about five years back.

  17. 17.

    Rome Again

    June 6, 2007 at 12:27 pm

    Windmills are a whole lot cheaper.

    Yeah, but there’s no profit from those once the construction company builds them. Hogs have the futures market to consider, and we all know about oil profits, don’t we?

  18. 18.

    Andrew

    June 6, 2007 at 12:56 pm

    Iowa has always maintain the head of hog:people ratio, around 5 or so, but carolina is now competitive for absolute numbers. Okay, maybe not by far. What we do have the most of by far are the monster waste lagoons full of hog waste. Pigs in Iowa tend to be raised on much smaller farms.

    Yeah, I think the amount of piggies in carolina has quadrupled in the past 10 years or so.

    (n.b. I move from Iowa to Carolina in 1999 and this was a frequent topic of debate.)

  19. 19.

    Badtux

    June 6, 2007 at 1:45 pm

    The Other Steve, fresh grapefruit tastes so good! And the cost of the water to water my grapefruit tree when I lived in Arizona was *far* less than I’d pay buying grapefruit in the grocery store. And while you don’t *have* to water mesquite and brittlebrush and such, if you water it once a month it stays leafed out and nice and green. Otherwise it is dormant for nine months of the year (it is adapted for the Sonoran desert, where the monsoon season when rain falls is three months and the rest is dry) and when dormant it looks, well, dead. BTW, the grapefruit tree got watered once a week during the hottest part of the summer, and once a month otherwise.

    You want something that uses lots of water, look at grass. Even a small grass lawn in Arizona uses a couple hundred gallons of water per week to water it. Luckily the high price of water is leading most people to tear out their grass lawns and put in desert-scaping.

  20. 20.

    MattT

    June 6, 2007 at 2:01 pm

    The inertia of industries like hog farming is the reason I bought me some carbon credits. I understand that CCs are a “scam” in the sense that I’m not really reducing greenhouse gasses, just giving industry money for things they are doing anyway to modernize their energy use. But I figure if the hog farmers (and others stricken unknowingly with inertia) see enough of us crazy treehuggers out there with Carbonfund.org bumper stickers they’ll start wondering how to get their share of these dumb enviros’ dollars…and maybe that will lead to some modernization happening faster than it otherwise would.

  21. 21.

    Off Colfax

    June 6, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    Speaking of water…

    Here’s a much more interesting power-generation system for your perusal: The Gravitational Vortex Power Plant. Enough electricity generation to power 12 American homes for a year, requires less than 200 yards of linear space to install, and theoretically fish & wildlife friendly, all for a price tag of approx $100k, unless we get a subsidy for it on this side of the pond. All of this makes it close to viable for farms, small townships and villages with existing watercourses.

  22. 22.

    ThymeZone

    June 6, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    When are you guys going to realize you live in a frickin desert and stop trying to grow trees?

    Uh, acutally the trees were here long before people were.

    Desert trees are pretty ubiquitous and plentiful here.
    Here’s what the Sonoran Desert looks like.

    These are the mesquite trees your charcoal is made from.

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