Dutch Harvest Chicken Manure to power 90,000 Homes!

Last week Dutch agriculture minister Gerda Verburg announced a groundbreaking development for the field as she unveiled the world ’s largest biomass power plant to run exclusively on poultry manure. The plant will convert a third of the nation’s chicken waste into energy while running at a capacity of 36.5 megawatts - enough to power 90,000 homes!

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/08/dutch-harvest-chicken-manure-to-power-90000-homes/

I've been meaning to look up the number of (occupied) residential units in America. The 2001 figure is 106,261,000. I assume the number hasn't changed profoundly in 7 years.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/ahsfaq.html

Now if it were poower from factory-farmed chickens: close, but no cigar.

Oil companies don't approve of chicken manure projects.

They won't get any funding, can't get any tax breaks, and will be dissed as usual by republicans.

Oil companies won't allow McSame and Bush to approve anything that does not sustain their strangle hold on Americans.

You still don't understand, do you Gerda? Distributed biomass power plants for distributed sources of chicken manure. If you are shoveling manure onto a truck and hauling it to a biomass plant, you are wasting fuel. Build smaller plants where the manure is generated and use the power locally, and send the excess onto the power grid when there is some.

The industrial revolution has polluted our thinking with "bigger is better" and "economies of scale". Instead, forward thinking people should look at the future of energy as a mosaic of small energy producing areas. Wind farms in the midwest will supply local electricity first and then, export the excess. Biomass will be collected and processed into biogas and electricity locally, and if there is excess, it can be sent out in a pipeline or on a transmission line. Solar, wind, and biomass are distributed sources of energy and shouldn't be made to fit the old lumped model of the enormous power plant.

Politicians need to get over their desire to cut ribbons at the dedication of the world's biggest _______ plant.

Community and even home effluent digesters combined with other alternatives would be a lot smarter. Still, it's a start.

The Netherlands is not a very big country. Moerdijk is within about 100 miles of the furthest point in the country and within about 50 miles of two thirds of the country (looking on Map-quest). I have no idea where the "poultry capital of the Netherlands" is but since they are only planning on using one-third of the crap there is a good chance that most of it will be local. Maybe you are right but I would like to see some supporting evidence for your statements.

PS: more "winging it" but I suspect that they use chicken crap as fertilizer. The article mentioned "the left over ash will be used to make fertilizers". Is it better, worse or the same as the untreated fertilizer? We've already seen alternative fuels drive up the price of food. I hope they have looked into this potential cost.

Even if it is only 10km from humongous chicken coop to biomass plant, that still means loading, using fuel to transport it, and unloading. The point about small plants is that they can be installed at the point of generation, right on the chicken farm, saving on trucks and fuel in the process, not to mention taking care of the shit vapors that waft over the countryside. If you want evidence, here is an article from some work at Clemson on biogas plants at hog farms, a point source of a lot of pollution in the Carolinas: http://virtual.clemson.edu/groups/agbioeng/bio/chastain/On-Farm%20Biogas-Summary.pdf

The process of biodigestion generally improves the end product for fertilizer uses. Untreated manure harbors pathogens and can burn plants from too much nitrogen. If they are burning the manure, then the nitrogen is lost and all the ash contains is phosphorus and potassium. If they are making biogas and using the leftover sludge for fertilizer, the fermentation process destroys over 99.9% of the pathogenic organisms and some available nitrogen is still left.

When the biomass is looked at as part of a cycle with manure as the input and energy and fertilizer as the outputs, it can be balanced with local needs for energy and fertilizer. Proper sizing of the plant can minimize the need to haul in manure from far away and the outputs of fertilizer and energy can minimize the need to import those two as well.

Having a digester on every farm may just not be efficient.

I may be wrong but my understanding is that European farms tend be smaller then US farms. As such they may not have the volume to justify separate digesters.

Also although transportation is expensive the cost of loading it and unloading it may be almost as expensive as loading, unloading and moving it. I can imagine (I don't know) that the chicken farmers would rather hire a guy with a truck and bobcat to remove the stuff then own a bobcat, maintain it, drive it and move it themselves. Bobcats aren't cheap and skilled bobcat operators are worth the money.

Then of course you have to worry about what to do with the methane. Most family farms don't have tanks to store methane or pumps to put the methane in a pipe that may or may not be on the property or to pressurize it into farm vehicles that don't currently run on methane.