Dealing with animal waste from intensive livestock facilities is expensive and controversial.
A Saskatoon company feels it has a solution.
Largely discredited by research in the 1980s, bacterial refining of animal wastes has a new champion.
Ben Voss, a principal partner and agricultural engineer with BDI Research in Saskatoon, has entered a joint venture with Bioscan, of Denmark, to create Canada’s first industrial scale animal waste refinery.
The private company, Clear Green Biotech Inc., plans to install its first farm-scale refinery in Saskatchewan some time next year.
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“Bioscan has found a way to keep the bacteria in the system and working. That is the secret to breaking down the waste efficiently,” said Voss.
In the past, bacterial conversion experiments involved batch processing of the manure. This process would remove half the manure and the bacteria population each time new waste was added to the system. This resulted in slow, inefficient processing and heat loss, which is necessary to the process of recovering nutrients in the waste.
All of this spelled doom for the technology, and researchers in North America turned to other methods of sewage disposal.
Bioscan developed a continuous flow design, called Biorek, which breaks the waste into its elements, including clean water.
The bio-reactor produces methane, carbon dioxide, sulfur, ammonia (the building block of nitrogen fertilizer), some phosphate and a few other nutrient byproducts.
CGB is so confident in its$2 million investment in the process that it intends to build and retain ownership of the farm-sized refineries. The company plans to charge producers about what they would otherwise pay for lagoon construction, waste facility management and disposal of manure.
CGB plans to market the system’s byproducts as fertilizer. Additional revenue will come from selling the carbon credits associated with capturing greenhouse gases that would otherwise be released by injecting or spreading hog manure.
The refineries also generate electricity, which could power the farm or be sold to the electrical utility grid. The heat generated could be used in barns and other buildings.
The first system is expected to be built at an undetermined 1,200 animal, farrow-to-finish hog site. CGB is negotiating with larger, greenhouse gas producing manufacturers and utilities over the rights to the carbon credits.
The system also works with other waste, such as human, food processing and livestock slaughter.
“Offal is like rocket gas to this system. It really makes it produce. Ideally one of these systems would be attached to a large (livestock) slaughter facility that produces both the offal and the manure,” said Voss.
He said the design would be practical for small communities such as Hutterite colonies where intensive livestock operations could turn waste into farm fertilizer, heat for homes and buildings and electricity for the community.
Bioscan is building facilities with partners like BDI in five countries around the world and has two operating farm scale refineries working in Denmark. Six more, including these in Saskatchewan and Quebec are on the drawing boards.
BDI plans to build 50 to 60 biorefineries over the next 15 years.
“We will have more in Manitoba and Alberta than in Saskatchewan because that is where the intensive livestock industry is centred,” said Voss.
