Burning Bio News

BioCycle Magazine compares the feasibility of two, commercial food waste anaerobic digesters. The article outlines some major considerations such as feedstock quality and sourcing, financing considerations, and markets.

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland visited the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center on the Wooster, OH, campus recently to see first-hand the anaerobic digester Cleveland-based quasar is building there. The digester will turn agricultural and other waste streams into methane that can then be used to generate electricity, thermal heat, natural gas or vehicle fuel. The 550,000-gallon digester that will be able to process 30,000 wet tons of biomass annually with more than 750 kW of electrical generation capacity.

General Mills has used oats for its high-energy cereal Cheerios for nearly 70 years, but the food giant is now preparing to put the grain to work as a source of energy for itself. Construction is under way this spring on a biomass steam boiler at the Golden Valley-based company’s milling plant in Fridley, MN, where it produces oat flour for Cheerios, Lucky Charms and other cereals. The boiler, scheduled to go online early next year, will burn oat hulls left over from the milling process. It replaces natural-gas boilers, making the mill partially self-sustaining, said John Hellwig, the project’s manager. It will also cut the mill’s carbon footprint by 21 percent, he added.

Gill’s Onions generates 300,000 lbs/day of residuals from the processing of fresh-cut onions. With an annual disposal bill of $500,000, it opted to install an AD system to treat the waste on-site and utilize the biogas. Onion waste is now an asset at Gill’s Onions in Oxnard, California, where a $9.5 million project is converting onion waste into renewable energy and cattle feed. The biogas powers two 300-kW fuel cells generating 0.6 MW of electricity to satisfy 75 percent of Gill’s base load power requirements. The fuel cells, supplied by Fuel Cell Energy in Danbury, Connecticut, operate on biogas and natural gas.

University of Central Florida professor Henry Daniell has developed a technology to produce ethanol from organic waste products. Daniell’s technique — developed with U.S. Department of Agriculture funding — uses plant-derived enzyme cocktails to break down orange peels and other waste materials into sugar, which is then fermented into ethanol.

Greeley Colorado is pursuing plans to construct a waste-to-energy facility that would utilize local agricultural and food processing waste streams to produce biogas for electricity generation. According a recently completed feasibility study, conducted by Symbios Technologies LLC, the most manageable and profitable scenario for a first-phase Greeley Clean Energy Park project would be a 2-megawatt anaerobic digester with a combined-heat-and-power unit for electricity generation, capable of processing more than 500 tons per day of waste from three main waste sources—cow manure from a JBS feedlot, and waste from Leprino Foods Cheese Plant and the city water pollution control facility.

Seneca BioEnergy (NY) was formed in early 2008 to make biodiesel fuel from corn, soybeans and grape seeds, planning to integrate its energy production with other small companies that need a source of energy. But grapeseed oil from Europe sells for more than $45 a gallon. Seneca BioEnergy rented a lab there to press the oil in a culinary-safe setting and made food-grade grapeseed oil to enter the Holiday market.

Affordable Bio Feedstock, Inc. has developed a brown grease waste recycling plant which turns grease into biofuels in Kissimmee, Florida. In addition to creating biofuels, the company also converts food solids into fertilizer or animal feedstock. The company has developed a Thermal Depolymerization technology, which allows them to separate its contents (oil, organic solids and water) into three commercially marketable products: brown grease, nutrient rich organic solids and nutrient rich water. The plant will process 50,000 gallons of grease trap waste per day.

Researchers with the National Institutes of Health find a strong relationship between Americans’ growing waistlnes and the growing waste of food and the energy to produce that unused food. Americans throw away over 40 percent of all available food each year. Production of that wasted food accounts for more than one-quarter of the U.S.’s total annual freshwater consumption and equates to 300 million barrels of oil, according to a study by researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). –mj: This is a great article to mess with our minds. If unused food is used for energy production, or livestock feed, is it still waste? If we throw away food before it goes bad, is that worse than getting sick from bad food? Food is bioenergy. If we overeat, we are not very carbon efficient. We can become much more efficient in the US, but food waste is not necessarily a bad thing.

The North Carolina Division of Pollution Prevention and Environmental Assistance has opened a new online commodity-trading Web site for organic materials to help expand the development of the biomass economy. The NC Biomass Trader will help connect those getting rid of such waste products such as waste vegetable oil, restaurant grease, wood waste, manures, food waste, forest products and byproducts and agricultural products and byproducts. The Web site at www.ncbiomasstrader.com

The Central Vermont Recovered Biomass Facility is using a $492,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to convert food waste into energy. The plan is to tap 14 tons a day of food scrap in the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District, combine it with 10 tons a day of manure from area dairy farms, and feed it into a biodigester to be built on the campus of Vermont Technical College in Randolph. The methane produced would be used either to fuel the college’s heating plant or to generate electricity for the campus. The Central Vermont district began diverting food scraps from landfills in 2004, sending the material instead to two composting sites.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week overwhelmingly passed what is likely the country’s most comprehensive recycling and composting ordinance. The Board voted 9-2 to require residents and business owners to sort recyclables, food waste and trash for weekly collection, in an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions and, ultimately, make the city landfill- and incinerator-free by 2020. The ordinance, which will take effect this fall, provides fines for failure to comply with the recycling/composting regulations.

Challenges in permitting the mixing of food wastes and other materials are chronicled in this excellent recent article in BioCycle Magazine. The reality that organic liquids have similar biological, chemical, and physical properties is not relevant to the permitting agencies. Traditionally the agencies are only set up to accept materials from certain sources.

Aerojet will build a small demonstration plant will be built at the National Environmental Test Site at Naval Base Ventura County in Port Hueneme, California. The project is part of a collaborative effort of the US Navy, Biodiesel Industries, and Aerojet to produce locally grown, renewable fuel for the Navy.

The city of West Lafayette is negotiating with Purdue to take food waste from the university and convert it into methane gas at the wastewater treatment plant. The methane would be used to generate electricity to help run the plant. Purdue officials say the university serves more than 3.25 million meals a year and produces about 20 tons of food waste a month. The university currently pays to haul that waste to a landfill.

San Francisco became the one of the first cities and counties in the country to adopt a mandatory recycling and composting ordinance for every building. The East Bay Municipal District (EBMUD), which supplies water and wastewater treatment to parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, plans to dramatically boost the amount of food scraps it converts to energy from 90 tons per week to 1,000 tons, or 200 tons per weekday.

Southern California Gas plans to award Gills Onions (Oxnard, CA) with $2.7 million for an anaerobic digester system that powers two 300-kilowatt fuel cells. Gills generates 300,000 pounds of onion waste each day. The resulting biogas powers two 300-kilowatt fuel cells, which will save Gills $700,000 a year in energy costs.

The City of San Jose, CA, is moving forward on their food and yard waste biogas power plant. The new facility will convert 150,000 tons of biomass/organic wastes into energy and employ 30 people.

BioCycle celebrated its first 50 years last month in California. It was quite an event! During the entire conference, there was an awareness that while most of us are fledgling pioneers on the bioeconomic frontier, Jerry Goldstein and his family have been out there cutting the wake — clearing the path — for the rest of us. This article is Part I of the first 50 years of the BioCycle story written by Nora Goldstein (Executive Editor).

In the Coachella Valley, CA, Thomas Azwell and Costco have forged a partnership — with the help of several million worms on a worm farm at the Salton Sea — turning green waste from Costco’s Palm Desert and La Quinta stores into high-grade organic fertilizer. Paper, cardboard, food scraps — anything that was alive at one time, Azwell said — are collected at the stores and then sent to California Bio-Mass, a composting facility in Thermal. The next stop is Salton Sea Farms, also in Thermal, where about 100,000 pounds of red wiggler earthworms chomp through the compost, refining and enriching it with beneficial microbes and bacteria. The resulting fertilizer, called Vermigrow, is now sold at 27 Costcos in California and is being used at organic farms.