Fibrowatt in the Wall Street Journal?
I would think that Minnesota’s experience with burning chicken shit would wake up the world. How is it that so many states had the sense to run Fibrowatt right out of town, Alan Muller & Green Delaware led the charge in Delaware, and just recently, Fibrowatt was run out of North Carolina. He’s been digging into their file at the MPCA, it’s intense, he spent a LOT of time in the basement file room, got piles of papers and a disc or two, and he got a copy of the agreement after it came out:
MPCA-Fibrominn Stipulation Agreement
FYI, here’s the PPA from November 2000 – I believe it’s been ratcheted up since:
Fibrominn PPA- November 2000
To review the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission file on Fibrominn go to www.puc.state.mn.us and “Search eDockets” and search for docket “00-1169.” The compliance filings are redacted, so the comparisons between Fibrominn, Laurentian, and District Energy in the most recent filing that would be so enlightening, isn’t… DRAT!
What’s Minnesota’s experience with Fibrowatt/Fibrominn:
Contact: Forrest Peterson, 320-441-6972 Willmar, Minn. — The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and Fibrominn of Benson reached an agreement recently resolving the company’s past failure to comply with state air-quality rules and permit conditions. Air emission violations occurring since 2007 resulted in a $65,000 penalty, and corrective actions including the installation of a new sulfur dioxide monitor at a minimum cost of $80,000. Fibrominn began operation in May 2007 burning primarily turkey litter to generate electricity. Since the start of operations, the facility has experienced numerous violations of its permit. The settlement addresses violations of late report submittals, failed performance test, and excess nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide emissions. The company also failed to self-report deviations that occurred during operation of the facility’s poultry litter-fired boiler. Fibrominn has since conducted the performance test and submitted a testing frequency plan, a continuous opacity monitor/continuous emissions monitor downtime elimination report, a pressure drop limit, a relative accuracy test audit test plan, a hydrochloric acid correlation curve and a permit compliance checklist. Minnesota law requires owners and operators of facilities with the potential to release air pollutants to have MPCA permits. Facilities must also carefully monitor and maintain equipment because emissions exceeding state standards can degrade air quality. The MPCA offers outreach and training to help facilities meet their permit requirements. For more information on air quality permits and emission standards, call Jennifer Lovett, MPCA air quality inspector, at 651-757-2538 or 1-800-657-3864. A stipulation agreement such as this is one of the tools used to achieve compliance with environmental laws. When calculating penalties, the MPCA takes into account how seriously the violation affected the environment, whether it is a first-time or repeat violation and how promptly the violation was reported to appropriate authorities. It also attempts to recover the calculated economic benefit gained by failure to comply with environmental laws in a timely manner. For a comprehensive list of enforcement actions by the MPCA, go to the agency’s Web site at www.pca.state.mn.us/newscenter/enforcement.html.
Here’s a link to Jim Turner’s blog digging into it when confronted with a proposal nearby in Page County, VA:
A Summary of Fibrowatt Posts
Where they were run out again:
Board says “Thanks, but no thanks”
But then we have yahoos like Delaware’s Senator Carper who just can’t seem to bend over far enough despite so much evidence on what a piss-poor idea poop power is:
Carper waste-to-energy proposal wins key vote
So what’s Fibrowatt up to?
Back to the beginning, the article about Fibrowatt in today’s Wall Street Journal that means Fibrowatt is gearing up for another assault on some unsuspecting or uncaring state, with this about their plant here in Minnesota:
Fibrowatt’s vice president for public and environmental affairs, Terry Walmsley, says sound combustion practices and pollution-control systems keep carbon-monoxide and sulfur-dioxide emissions at safe levels. But in December, Minnesota’s environmental agency, citing “numerous” permit violations, fined Fibrowatt $65,000 and ordered it to upgrade the sulfur-dioxide monitor at its Minnesota plant. Mr. Walmsley says the plant’s recent report to state regulators showed pollutants in 2009 were well below allowable limits.
Here’s the full article:
JULY 11, 2010
By ANN CARRNS
Poultry farms in the U.S. generate roughly 17 million tons of chicken manure annually, creating a huge disposal problem. Some energy researchers believe they have a solution: use that manure to create electricity.
Many farmers use chicken litter—a mixture of manure and bedding—as a fertilizer, either spreading it on their own croplands or selling it to other growers. But the litter increasingly is being blamed for phosphorus-laden runoff that chokes waterways in heavy poultry-producing areas, and environmentalists are pushing the federal government to set limits on its use.
Fibrowatt LLC, a unit of privately held Homeland Renewable Energy, based in Langhorne, Pa., says it has an answer. The company wants to erect litter-fueled 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 U.K. in the 1990s. It built the U.S.’s first poultry-waste-to-energy plant in 2007 in Minnesota, the nation’s largest turkey-producing state. The $200 million Minnesota plant burns 500,000 tons 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 says.
The company says 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 fueled 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,” says 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, says sound combustion practices and pollution-control systems keep carbon-monoxide and sulfur-dioxide emissions at safe levels. But in December, Minnesota’s environmental agency, citing “numerous” permit violations, fined Fibrowatt $65,000 and ordered it to upgrade the sulfur-dioxide monitor at its Minnesota plant. Mr. Walmsley says the plant’s recent report to state regulators showed pollutants in 2009 were well below allowable limits.
Fibrowatt says its poultry-litter plants can produce power at a cost of about nine to 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.
Fibrowatt isn’t the only organization working on technology for turning chicken manure into energy. REM Engineering Inc. of Roswell, Ga., has patented gasification technology for burning chicken litter in industrial settings. Last year at a chicken-feed mill in Fairmount, Ga., a test system burned some 15 tons of raw litter a day, creating gas that heated a boiler to produce steam used in making feed pellets. A full-size unit would burn at least 75 tons daily. The ash residue, says engineer Doug Latulippe, can be used to make fertilizer that contains phosphorus that isn’t water soluble, which helps prevent runoff.
North Carolina State University is slowly toasting chicken manure in a special oven, a process known as torrefaction. The process creates gases that can be recycled and used to power the oven, as well as “biochar,” a charcoal-like substance that captures carbon, slowing its release into the atmosphere. Biochar can then be used to improve soil quality.
And a team under Virginia Polytechnic Institute engineering professor Foster Agblevor is using a technology known as pyrolysis on a farm in Dayton, Va., to rapidly heat poultry litter to a high temperature, creating biochar, as well as vapors that are condensed into “bio-oil,” a liquid being tested for use as a potential fuel oil. Early findings, however, suggest the oil needs significant refinement to work as well as petroleum products.
So where is Fibrowatt headed next?
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