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WELTEC BIOPOWER's expertise has won their client Fernbrook Bio the 2012 UK AD & Biogas Associations (ADBA) industry award for "Best Biogas Project". Their anaerobic digestion facility which produces a 1.5 MW output impressed the judges with its efficient in operation and innovations within its design. From this fact and the reputation of ADBA, we can reasonably assume that it is the top example of the best in waste utilisation AD plant technology currently available.
The plant is siutated near Kettering, Northamptonshire and it is supplying about 3,000 households with power. To do that it processes approximately 30,000 tonnes per annum of biowaste and food waste and converting it into electricity. For this purpose, WELTEC had equipped the biogas plant for the operator to include food unpacking, separation and pasteurisation systems.
Please vist the original webste (link below) for the full article:
"Fernbrook Bio" is very happy about the award. Following the award ceremony, Director Shaun Cherry commented: "We have been cooperating with WELTEC BIOPOWER for almost four years, and we are pleased with this partnership, which has now won due and deserved recognition in the form of the 'Best AD Project' award. WELTEC has truly deserved this award because it offers, not only top-edge premium plants, but also efficient service." ADBA's decision to award Fernbrook Bio with the title also included the operators' community work through visits to and from local schools and systematic publicity activities.
Another biogas plant of WELTEC BIOPOWER also made it onto the shortlist of nominations: the 1.3 MW "Lower Reule Bioenergy" installation in Gnossall, Staffordshire, which also processes food waste. This biogas plant's electricity is also supplied to approx 2,600 homes. The operator uses the heat generated from the plant to heat their farm buildings and to dry the digestate, which is spread out over agricultural areas as a fertiliser. Lower Reule Bioenergy was nominated in the "Best integration of AD into a farming business" and "Best AD Project" categories.
The palm oil industry has been seen as less than perfect in a number of areas recently, one aspect of concern has been the worry that palm oil plantations are big fossil fuel energy consumers. In more than one nation as we can see from the video below, a biogas project gives a positive image for oil palm industry. Once again Anaerobic Digestion is being brought forward as a force for good, and the AD process is adopted yet again. Please visit the original article website after reading our excerpt:
TAWAU:
Sabah Chief Minister Datuk Seri Musa Aman is confident that the biogas project being explored by the plantation sector in the state, can create a positive image for the oil palm industry.
He said it would be seen as an environment friendly industry which gave serious consideration to the protection of the environment.
He said the technology for biogas production from oil palm waste was not just environment friendly but also helped in the electricity generation for the plants and in the process, reduce the dependency on fossil fuel which is a source of air pollution.
“Previously, the disposal of waste from oil palm and the oil palm mills, posed a lot of problems for us. Now, it has become a source of electricity,” he added.
Musa said this in his speech while officiating the opening of the Biogas Plant at the Sawit Apas Balung mill owned by Kumpulan Sawit Kinabalu here yesterday.
The biogas plant project is the first for Kumpulan Sawit Kinabalu, a state government agency, and in line with its aim to create sustainable wealth while taking into consideration the protection of the environment in economic operations.
Musa, who is also the Finance Minister, said the state government was committed to development without sidelining environmental protection.
“We hope this commitment will receive strong support from oil palm plantation companies in Sabah,” he added.
He also hoped that more companies would explore the production of environmental friendly energy and at the same time, contribute to the renewable energy sector in the state.
“We need to be more creative and innovative to continue the quest for new ways to drive the search for energy from sources which were previously considered useless,” he added. — Bernama
We are pleased to report that the UK is seeing progress on AD Plant projects, as WRAP funding is allocated to a UK biogas company. The following is quoted from a Bioenergy News magazine article , on 17 January 2012:
"UK-based Malaby Biogas has received a loan from an anaerobic digestion (AD) fund, Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), which will go towards building a new plant.
The facility will be based in Wiltshire, and as Bioenergy Insight reported last month, will be built on a former 12 acre smallholding site.
The £800,000 (€960,000) loan will be used for the construction of the plant, which is costing a total of £5 million.
Malaby plans to use technology provider Marches Biogas for the installation and hopes to start commissioning the project in March.
‘Feedstock for the plant will be non-packaged food waste supplied by a new commercial collection operator with additional material potentially coming from other commercial and industrial food waste providers within the local area,’ says Malaby director Thomas Minter.
‘Initially the plant will process around 17,000 tonnes of waste a year and we’d hope to be able to handle up to 20,000 tonnes at full capacity.’
It is the first loan to be given by the fund and the programme aims to handout more to similar projects.
‘Malaby is the first of what we hope will be a number of companies to benefit from the anaerobic digestion loan fund and it is excellent to see such good progress being made at the Wiltshire plant,’ says WRAP director Steve Creed.
‘We’re currently considering a number of other applications, and the new round of loan awards for 2012 has just begun, so we’d encourage anyone who is interested in the fund to get in touch with us.’"
I was amazed to read this article, which is quoted below. "Low energy prices" - do these people live on the same planet as the rest of us? This would have been an exceeding forward thinking and imaginative scheme.
An eagerly anticipated feasibility study on Cayuga County’s biogas pipeline concept has not yet been published, but it appears that economic and political factors may lead some interested farmers in another direction.
The current proposal, for a county-built pipeline connecting several large farms with the county’s industrial park in Aurelius, is the latest iteration of an idea that’s been in the works for about a decade.
The thinking of the farmers and their public and private partners has evolved with the vagaries of energy markets, politics and public opinion, with the fluctuating price of natural gas being perhaps the biggest variable.
From the 1970s until the turn of the century, the cost of natural gas stayed near $2 for 1,000 cubic feet. But beginning in 2000, it started on a steady rise, hitting a high of $10.79 in July 2008.
For investors, the calculus was simple: as traditional energy prices continued to rise, it became more and more appealing to explore alternative energy sources, biomethane gas first among them.
In the last three years, however, those historic high gas prices have fallen back to Earth, trading at $3.82 this September.
The lower the natural gas prices, the less incentive to find an alternative-energy replacement, something Spruce Haven Farm owner Doug Young acknowledged in an interview last week.
“Low energy prices are the reason this (pipeline) is probably not going to happen,” he said. “A few years ago the energy prices were high and people were very concerned about climate change. Since they’ve found these huge reserves of natural gas and are tapping into them and it looks like the U.S. has a long-term supply of fossil fuel, it looks like it took the pressure off.”
That price swing complicated two previous efforts to get the pipeline built with public and private funding.
In 2006, Long Island energy development company Global Common received a $1 million grant from NYSERDA for a cooperative project with Spruce Haven and Oakwood farms, two of the county’s largest dairies.
In the grant application, Global Common CEO Robert Foxen described a $17 million project to develop a centralized anaerobic digester at Oakwood, converting manure from four farms into biogas liquid fertilizer , liquid fertilizer and solids usable for bedding.
Foxen predicted 125 new full-time jobs, $75 million in construction and an increase in milk sales from $22 million a year to $67 million a year, the result of tripling the cow population at the participating farms to 21,000.
The digester was to have generated about five megawatts of electricity at start-up and up to 15 megawatts over the next 20 years, to be sold back into the grid through a long-term purchase agreement.
Of the $1 million, Global Common collected $100,000 for meeting preliminary planning goals, but never moved forward with the project.
For one thing, the two other farms that were to join Spruce Haven and Oakwood never materialized, according to Thomas Siesinger, the project manager with NYSERDA.
“We’re not really pushing that because the farms aren’t pushing it and want to go another way,” Siesinger said. “That money is still on the table (but) I guess I’d be surprised if they went back to the two-farm proposal or even the pipeline one.”
Young, the project leader, said he believed the remaining $900,000 from NYSERDA is no longer available.
Global Common is no longer intimately involved in the pipeline planning but could still have an interest in marketing the gas if anything ever gets built.
“There has been discussion of what their role could be in the project,” said Kelly O’Hara of Oakwood. “Really, (Foxen) is just willing to do whatever makes sense and helps. ... It’s a whole different realm from dairy farming.”
Foxen declined to comment on the NYSERDA grant or Global Common’s involvement with the pipeline, saying he was no longer up to date on the project.
Two years after granting $1 million to Global Common, NYSERDA heard another pitch for funding related to the pipeline.
This time, the solicitor was NYSEG, which has held informal discussions with the farmers over the years concerning the distribution and sale of whatever power may be generated.
In a 2008 presentation -- just when natural gas prices were at a record high -- a NYSEG representative told NYSERDA that the company was negotiating a gas purchase agreement with the farmers, known collectively as Cayuga Renewable Energy.
He detailed a two-fold project: first, the farmers would design and build on-site digesters at a combined (private) cost of about $13.5 million.
Second, the biogas would be cleaned and delivered via a pipeline to a NYSEG metering station, from where it would go into Auburn’s distribution system.
NYSEG requested $500,000 in funding for the second part only, part of what it estimated would be a $1.65 million project.
That state funding never materialized, largely because NYSEG cooled on the idea.
“For a variety of reasons, including the economic downturn and a reduction in the market price of natural gas, the project did not move forward,” company spokesman Clayton Ellis wrote in an email.
***
In the short term, the decision on the project’s progress rests with the county Legislature, which is awaiting the results of a feasibility study.
County Planning Director Stephen Lynch originally forecast that the first part of the $125,000 study would be public by the end of October.
That release has been delayed by a recent ruling from the state Public Service Commission that could change how farmers use their energy output.
Until this summer, the amount of electricity farmers could sell back to a utility company was limited by their usage at the meter to which the generator is hooked up.
The problem is that large farms can have as many as 20 different meters. The new state ruling issued this summer, and a new law passed by the state Legislature, allow farmers to combine their usage on all meters, a concept known as remote net metering.
The bottom line is that farms will be able to sell back much more electricity, with the possible consequence that they will no longer need a pipeline to get rid of excess energy.
Lynch said the supply side of the equation -- how much gas the farms can generate -- is more significant than the question of demand or natural gas prices.
“If the supply isn’t there, the gas price is a moot point,” he said.
The Legislature voted in July to spend up to $49,000 on the study and associated legal fees, but the county has spent almost none of that money so far by using state funds first, Lynch said.
O’Hara said he believed the pipeline has been the victim of unfair negative publicity and encouraged the county “to get out and do some PR work and make people understand that this is collecting energy that would essentially be wasted.”
“We don’t need this -- we’ll continue operating our farms the same way,” he said. “It’s just an opportunity for the county to attract some new industry. ... I think overall the level of interest (among farmers) is the same, but the economics of it is that it will either make sense or it won’t.”
Has anyone thought about phoshpate reserves? If chemical fertilizers will continue to be used then someone should be conisdering for how long phosphate sources will continue to be available at current prices...
(SeeNews Renewables) - Sep 16, 2011 - German green energy solutions developer Weltec Biopower has finished its fifth biogas power plant in the Czech Republic, after four months of construction and approval by the responsible authorities.
The foundation was laid in March, followed by the installation of the 2,500 cu m stainless steel fermenter, the cogenerator and the 35 cu m vertical batcher. The biogas processing equipment came in May and the test operations started in June, when the plant also received regulatory approval.
The plant's 366 kW gas engine feeds electricity into the grid. The facility runs on agricultural substrates and manure from the nearby farms. The investors received financial support from the EU fund for both environmental issues and rural and agricultural development.
The Czech government sets top priority on green energy production and by 2015 biomass should provide the bigger share of it. This moves players from the country and abroad to invest in the sector. [ http://anaerobic-digestion.com ]
Copyright 2011 SeeNews. All Rights Reserved. www.seenews.com | www.world.seenews.com; e-mail: editor@seenews.com.
The waste from 9,000 pigs will be used to produce electricity and cut CO2 emissions
In North Carolina, US, Duke University and electric and gas service provider Duke Energy, have developed a renewable energy project with the help of search engine Google. The project creates electricity from pig excrement.
The biogas plant has been set up at the Yadkinville-based Loyd Ray Farms, which is home to 9,000 pigs.
Duke Energy and the university have invested $1.2 million (€880,000 million) in the project to date, however Google's investment has not been divulged.
Originally proposed almost three years ago, the project also received grants from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources Lagoon Conversion Program.
The plant will slash CO2 emissions by 5,000 tonnes a year – the same as removing 900 cars from the road.
Both Duke Energy and Duke University will cover the costs of operating and maintaining the plant for the first 10 years that it is online. Google will cover a percentage of the university's costs in return for some of the carbon offsets for a five-year period.
Camco International Limited (CAO.L), a developer of clean energy projects, has begun construction on the largest dairy biogas project in North America.
(Above video is not related to the post but may be of interest.)
The project, which will be operated by the consortium AgPower Group LLC, involves the installation of anaerobic digesters to convert cow manure at an Idaho dairy farm into enough biogas to fuel 4.5 megawatts (MW) of generation capacity.
Construction of the project is expected to cost under $25 million, and it has been fully financed, according to Camco.
The project qualifies for the federal grant program established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, under which 30% of eligible construction costs are reimbursed.
A 20-year power purchase agreement is in place and the facility also has multi-year contracts for the Sale of sterilized fiber (an end-product of the anaerobic digestion process). The renewable energy certificates and emission credits qualify under California's new renewable energy and greenhouse gas regulations.
Completion of construction is anticipated in the first half of 2012.
"Closing financing and commencing construction on the largest dairy biogas project in the US is a major achievement for the Camco North America team. The USDA target has outlined potential to roll out anaerobic digesters across 8,000 farms with potential generation of over 1,500 MW in the US and we are in a pole position to lead this effort," Yariv Cohen, Camco President says.
