VIKING, Alta. – Electrical generation from manure is no longer a dream for Alberta livestock producers.
“Intensive livestock operations now can become independent power producers,” said Grant Meikle, vice-president of marketing with BioGem.
He installed the company’s first generator that turns methane from manure into electricity for an Alberta colony. The Iron Creek Colony, south of Viking, hasn’t had a power bill for 14 months, a big savings after spending more than $250,000 on power in 2001.
For the past three months the colony has sold power to the provincial power grid, all from the manure of its sheep, hogs, chicken and cattle.
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“We’ve approached a liability and turned it into a commodity,” said Meikle, who estimates it will take the colony eight years to pay off the $2 million generator at the current power rates by selling electricity on the provincial grid, plus its savings in manure injection, water, heat and electricity.
“The price of electricity and the price of heat is driving the need to take care of waste properly.”
The central Alberta colony was searching for an alternative energy source when it teamed up with the newly formed BioGem Power Systems of Ponoka, Alta., looking for a site to build its first generator.
In Europe, electrical generation from manure is established technology. Andy Hofer, Iron Creek Colony secretary, toured several livestock operations in Belgium, Holland and Germany to see how viable it is.
“They’ve been operating for 20 or 30 years,” said Hofer of the electrical generators he saw on his tour. Often, smaller dairies, hog barns or villages team up to make electricity from their waste.
In Canada, Meikle estimates producers need an equivalent of a 1,200-sow operation, which produces about 28 million litres of liquid manure, to be feasible.
A 5,000-head feedlot would produce 900 kilowatts of electricity per hour, three times the size of the Iron Creek Colony operation.
At Iron Creek the manure from the hog barns is flushed into a receiving tank where the solids are chopped into uniform pieces before being sent to the three methane digesters. The digesters produce the biogas by decomposing and fermenting the manure.
A special heavy duty rubber cap fits snugly over the concrete digesters to allow expansion of the methane gas. At times, the cover can balloon 4.5 metres above the concrete tank. The trapped biogas is then transferred to a piston engine, which generates electricity and thermal energy.
Meikle estimates it cost three to four cents a kilowatt to produce and can be sold on the provincial power grid for up to 10 cents.
Depending on the time of day, the price of power from the provincial power pool can range from one to 10 cents, but consumers pay up to 21 cents per kilowatt hour, depending on where they live and their power supplier.
At night, when power costs one and a half cents a kilowatt-hour, the generator is shut off and the colony gets its power from the provincial grid.
“I think we’ll see more of these,” said Hofer.
The trade secret isn’t making methane from manure but how to deal with poisonous hydrogen sulfide, a byproduct of the manure, said Larry Giesbrecht, president of BioGem.
In the oil and gas industry, expensive scrubbers are used to remove H2S.
“That’s the key to what we’re doing. H2S removal is the key to our product that North Americans have not come up with,” said Giesbrecht.
After the electrical generation process, a small amount of super concentrated fertilizer is left over. It can be used for fertilizer or turned into a protein supplement fed back to the animals.
