July 12, 2010

Energy company sees potential in chicken manure

Fibrowatt LLC, a unit of privately held Homeland Renewable Energy, plans to erect litter-fuelled power plants in big poultry-producing states such as Georgia, Arkansas and North Carolina.

Fibrowatt is an offshoot of the company that developed the first such plants in the UK in the 1990s. It built the US's first poultry-waste-to-energy plant in 2007 in Minnesota, the nation's largest turkey-producing state. The US$200 million Minnesota plant burns 500,000 tonnes of turkey litter each year. The process creates steam to turn turbines in a 55-megawatt power plant, providing electricity for about 40,000 homes, Fibrowatt said.

The company said progress on its proposed projects in other states has been slow because it has to negotiate power-purchase agreements with utilities, work out contracts with farmers for litter and obtain state permits before starting construction. It also has run into opposition from critics, who worry that power plants fuelled by poultry litter will emit high levels of pollutants such as nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and particulates, even with state-of-the-art pollution-control devices.

"It's a dirty form of fuel," said Louis Zeller, science director of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, which in May helped scuttle a Fibrowatt project proposed for Surry County, in western North Carolina.

Fibrowatt's vice president for public and environmental affairs, Terry Walmsley, said sound combustion practices and pollution-control systems keep carbon-monoxide and sulphur-dioxide emissions at safe levels. But in December, Minnesota's environmental agency, citing "numerous" permit violations, fined Fibrowatt US$65,000 and ordered it to upgrade the sulphur-dioxide monitor at its Minnesota plant. Walmsley said the plant's recent report to state regulators showed pollutants in 2009 were well below allowable limits.

Fibrowatt said its poultry-litter plants can produce power at a cost of about 9-13 cents per kilowatt-hour, including federal subsidies. Conventional coal, by comparison, costs about 10 cents a kilowatt-hour to produce without subsidies, according to the federal Energy Information Administration's latest analysis of average electricity-generation costs for new plants. Helping Fibrowatt's case in North Carolina is the fact that the state has ordered utilities to begin using electricity produced specifically from alternative sources such as poultry litter beginning in 2012.