Clean Water from Waste
Will Kingma, owner of Kingdom Farms, thinks that ethanol—as part of a bioenergy cluster—is the answer for his hog operation near Bentley, Alberta. Kingma envisions a future where his hog operation works synergistically with four elements: a water recycling system, an ethanol plant, ethanol coproducts for feed and biodigestion for power generation.
Kingma’s 1,800 sows produce about 35,000 to 40,000 pigs a year that, in turn, produce about 18 million gallons of manure. After getting complaints from the citizens of nearby Bentley, Kingma started looking for ways to reduce the odor. “We wanted to be able to produce hogs in a neighborly fashion,” Kingma tells EPM. He was also looking for ways to bolster his business financially, due to the poor economics of hog farming.
After several years of searching, Kingma is partway to his goal. The first step was installing a Livestock Water Recycling system, recovering 70 percent of the liquid in hog manure as potable water. The process reduces the original manure volume by 85 percent, resulting in a small amount of solids and an ammonium-rich fertilizer that can be sold or used on the farm. Its planned processing speed is 30 gallons of manure a minute, said Ross Thurston, president of LWR, the Calgary, Alberta, company that manufactures the system.
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This is the first system installed on a hog farm and several more are in the works, he says. The company has units that can handle varying amounts, from 10 million gallons of manure yearly, to two combined units processing up to 75 million. Kingma estimates the savings alone from reducing the amount of material to be trucked away amounts to about $8 a head. LWR breaks it down this way: The current cost of handling and transporting manure ranges from 90 cents to $1.50 a gallon while the LWR system costs about 25 to 40 cents per gallon of manure to operate. “Their pay-out will be less than two years,” Thurston says.
The next step for Kingdom Farms is a wheat-to-ethanol project. The 6.6 MMgy proposed ethanol plant is currently in the engineering, permitting and financing stage, with a projected construction start in the spring or fall of 2011, Kingma says. The plan is for recycled water from the LWR system to supply about 50 percent of the ethanol plant’s water needs. The ethanol plant will produce wet distillers grains (WDG), half of which will be pumped directly to the barns and fed to the hogs on site. Currently, Kingdom Farms purchases WDG from the Permolex International ethanol plant located about half an hour away. Producing WDG on site will save the hog operation another $10 to $12 a head.
The remaining WDG will go into a biodigester to produce methane gas for electrical generation. It would produce more than enough power for on-farm use and may also produce enough electricity to be sold to the grid, Kingma says. In addition, because there’s no need to dry the distillers grains, the plant won’t need centrifuges or dryers, which should save about one-third of the capital costs.
Zeroing in on Cellulose
Jeffrey Macdonald teaches biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina. He’s also CEO of BioRxn, a startup company working to develop a cost-effective way to turn manure into electric power and ethanol while reducing odor. Macdonald got the idea when driving through North Carolina, the state ranked second behind Iowa for hog production. Two North Carolina counties, Duplin and Sampson, have a population of about 50,000 each, more than 2 million hogs each and a big odor issue.
All the volatile aromatics in the air got him thinking. Why not take that problem and turn it into methane, CO2, recycled water and ethanol? Hogs, once they hit 200 pounds, excrete an amazing 2.2 gallons of waste a day, Macdonald says. That’s nearly 10 million gallons of manure daily from the more than 4 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties alone. Macdonald calculates North Carolina hogs are currently wasting $900 million a year in unutilized power. He calculates that BioRxn technology could convert the waste from 1,000 hogs to 20 kilowatts of energy and receive a premium of 18 cents per kilowatt from a renewable energy credit.
At a typical hog operation in North Carolina, hog manure is moved from barn pits to lagoons and then spread over fields as fertilizer. The state has limits on how much manure can be spread as fertilizer, however, and operators aren’t allowed to create any more lagoons than the ones already in use. Macdonald’s idea is to put a bioreactor between the hog barn and the lagoon, remove gasses and cellulose and send recycled water to the lagoon. “We don’t want to get rid of the lagoon, per se, we’ll just get rid of the stink,” he says. Another positive will be that by reducing the nutrient load in the lagoons, hog operations could potentially expand since the land limitation for spreading waste due to overloading of nutrients would be mitigated.
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