Despite manure’s value as a fertilizer, farmers find it a costly and socially difficult product to manage.
Clear Green Environmental of Saskatoon announced last week that it hopes it has a solution to the problem. Located at a Cudworth, Sask., hog farm, the $1.5 million project will turn manure into electricity and fertilizer.
“We would have liked to have a representative from Cudworth here today, but apparently they’re all seeding,” said Ben Voss, president of Clear Green, at the May 14 announcement.
Florian Possberg, president of Big Sky Pork of Humboldt, the province’s largest hog producer, attended the announcement and confirmed the difficulties of manure in his industry. He said his company is considering the Clear Green technology for future projects.
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“Manure management is one of the biggest limitations for the growth of the intensive livestock business. Our manure is 97 percent water and three percent solids. It means transporting and dispersion is expensive,” Possberg said.
For each barn project, $250,000 worth of lagoons must be built. Twice a year the manure is hauled to farm fields and the hog producer gets only a 10 percent cost recovery on this operation. Add in environmental monitoring and community complaints of odour and potential pollution, and the costs can deter investors and slow development and expansion plans.
Voss saw these problems as a business opportunity. His three-year-old company uses a system based on European and Asian models. In those regions the processing of animal and human waste into energy is economically and, in some cases, legally required.
Manure is chopped, filtered, separated, strained and ground, heated to 38 C and introduced to bacteria that digest it inside concrete tanks the size of large grain bins. As a byproduct of the digestion, methane gas is formed. The gas is channelled into small turbine engines driving 30-kilowatt generators that produce electricity, which is sold into the existing power grid. Heat from the engines and generators is used to preheat the manure.
As the slurry from the digested manure is recovered, its nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are chemically and mechanically filtered out and sold as fertilizer. The remaining water is used to operate barns or for irrigation.
Clear Green is relying on engineering from the German firm Krieg and Fischer, which has built more than 100 biogas plants worldwide. The Saskatchewan company’s team developed the extraction system.
Last year Voss secured venture capital financing with Calgary-based ENTx Capital Corp.
“Attracting venture capital was key to our plans,” said Voss.
The Cudworth project will be the first production-sized manure processing facility for Clear Green. The firm will build, own and operate the facilities, making money by getting a fee for processing the manure based on the volume of material handled.
In this case, both the Cudworth Pork Investors Group and Sask Power are committing money to the project. The utility is providing $465,000 for methane-driven micro-turbine generators.
But Clear Green sees its long-term future in a fee-for-service operation.
“Not only do livestock producers get a price they can count on for their manure management, but they also can get fixed-price energy from their own methane. Ask any large pig barn owner about that extra $50,000 in natural gas costs they have to absorb this year,” said Voss.
At Cudworth, CPIG gains a waste management facility and Sask Power develops a new energy source. While Sask Power will buy $35,000 worth of electricity from the project annually, the greenhouse gas credits will be split between Clear Green and the utility.
“Kyoto and Canada’s position on the Kyoto Agreement are critical to our success. When we remove methane and produce green power, we take those first steps into what is a new part of the modern economy in North America,” Voss said about the trade in greenhouse gas credits.
Sask Power’s dependence on coal-fired energy makes it the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the province. Reducing reliance on dirty sources of energy and obtaining greenhouse gas credits are becoming a major focus for the company, say its officials.
Terry Page is in charge of what is termed “distributed supply” for Sask Power.
“Whenever we can avoid having to build high cost transmission lines and have smaller sources of electricity being generated locally and fed back into the power grid, it results in lower cost energy for us as a business,” he said.
Possberg said that if the technology works, it “will mean barns could be built closer to slaughter plants and population centres. Lowering costs of trucking. More access to labour…. Barns could be more concentrated and efficient.
“Now locations are limited by the amount of land we have to spread on, the cost of hauling manure and public acceptance of odour. Without lagoons and manure to be spread, that changes things. It could be very big for Saskatchewan’s intensive livestock industry.”
Maynard Sonntag, minister in charge of the Crown Investment Corp., agreed.
“Using biogas created from manure, producing power, has tremendous economic and environmental potential to help grow our hog industry in this province,” he said.
Voss said Clear Green’s income will come from energy sales, fees for processing manure and fertilizer sales.
“That alone will make it profitable. When you add greenhouse gas credits, it will be a very good business to be in.”
He plans to offer similar service to municipalities for human waste and to food processors.
“When it comes to barns, I’m not going to be on poo-patrol looking for manure. The projects will have to fit the process and we intend to be selective.”
Voss hopes to begin generating power in Cudworth, enough to power 30 average Saskatchewan homes, sometime late next summer.
