What kind of processing plant can turn a rotting, slimy, disgusting-smelling pile of turkey slaughterhouse waste into $12,600 worth of fuel oil? How about municipal sewage, old tires and mixed plastics? Discover Magazine highlighted Changing World Technologies, the company that owns this plant, back in 2006. It’s exciting technology, and Changing World Technologies is hardly the only company working on it. The Dutch have harvested enough power from chicken manure to power 90,000 homes.
From Discover Magazine:
The smell is a mélange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones and a distinct fecal note. It comes from the worst stuff in the world—turkey slaughterhouse waste. Rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines, and lungs swollen with putrid gases have been trucked here from a local Butterball packager and dumped into an 80-foot-long hopper with a sickening glorp. In about 20 minutes, the awful mess disappears into the workings of the thermal conversion process plant in Carthage, Missouri.
Three tanker trucks arrive here on peak production days, loading up with 500 barrels of oil made from 270 tons of turkey guts and 20 tons of pig fat. Most of what cannot be converted into fuel oil becomes high-grade fertilizer; the rest is water clean enough to discharge into a municipal wastewater system.
Despite these breakthroughs, Changing World Technologies has struggled over the years. The highly complex process is expensive, and government subsidies were hard to come by. People who live near the plant complain about its odor incessantly. Changing World Technologies recently applied for a $100M IPO, hoping it will help them get off the ground.
Other companies have had more luck. Inhabitat reports that the Dutch have built the world’s largest biomass power plant to run entirely on poultry manure.
Situated in Moerdijk, the 150 million euro plant was constructed by the Dutch multi-utility company Delta. It will convert roughly 440,000 tons of chicken manure into energy annually, generating more than 270 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year. The plant also addresses a key environmental problem in the Netherlands: “managing the vast excess stream of chicken manure, which, until today, had to be processed at a high cost”.
Delta’s biomass plant has even been described as being carbon neutral, since it will prevent the manure from sitting in fields and seething greenhouse gases into the air. Once methane from the poultry waste has been extracted and ignited, the left over ash will be used to make fertilizers and other agricultural products.
This is exciting stuff. Imagine if we could use this technology to its full advantage – fuel from waste! It’s the ultimate in Cradle to Cradle.
Link [Discover Magazine] + [Inhabitat]
