Agricultural Versus
Industrial Waste for Energy
Feedstock availability, consistency
are challenges to development
of waste-to-energy
projects
By Jessica Ebert
Editor’s note: This article is reprinted courtesy Biomass Magazine,
www.biomassmagazine.com.
ny conversation about the challenges of
converting waste into energy — regardless of
whether the source of the feedstock is
agricultural or industrial, and regardless of
whether the end products are solid or liquid
fuel or electricity — comes down to an issue
of feedstock availability.
“I don’t care what technology you have. If you don’t have
the feedstocks, you don’t have anything,” says Steve Flick, a
Missouri farmer and chairman of the Show
Me Energy Cooperative board of directors.
“We say it’s like having the prettiest girl
ask you to the dance. If you can’t dance, then
you might as well not embarrass yourself.”
The cooperative, which is made up of
more than 400 farmers, is just now
stepping out on the renewable energy
dance floor with a flexible business model
betting it will garner admiration, rather
than embarrassment.
Show Me Energy has its origins in
west-central Missouri, where a group of
farmers and producers with a vision of
using cellulose for energy production
began meeting monthly until 2004, when
they officially organized under the state’s
New Generation Cooperative law. At that
time, the group sanctioned a feasibility
study, which in turn determined that the
model the group envisioned would be a
good fit for producers in western Missouri
and eastern Kansas.
“Missouri was a prime state because we
have all these dichotomies of scale,” says
Flick, a seed-company owner and farmer
who will be planting six acres of
miscanthus this spring. “We have corn
farmers in the north, grass-seed farmers in
the south, wheat farmers in the west and
soybean farmers in the central part of the
state. It’s a really good fit.”
In-house technology used
At the center of the cooperative’s model is technology
developed in-house that converts agricultural residues into
biomass fuel pellets. The farmers who invest in the
cooperative sign a market agreement committing them to
produce a certain amount of biomass each year.
In addition, co-op members must adhere to high standards
of environmental stewardship, Flick says. For corn stover,
producers must leave about 30 percent of the residue on their
fields. For native grasses, farmers must harvest in the late fall
after a killing frost and leave rows around waterways and
tributaries.
“We are adamant about making this business model not
only profitable, but realistically environmentally friendly,” he
says.
The farmers that abide by these rules collect and store the
residue on their farms in round bales, which are eventually
trucked to the cooperative’s new pellet-production facility in
Centerview, Mo. This is the main drawback to using
agricultural residues as an energy feedstock: they are bulky
and transporting them becomes economically
disadvantageous after a certain distance.
Show Me Energy pays each farmer a certain amount per
ton for residue and also pays for the hauling costs within a
100-mile radius of the plant.
Farmers outside this area
aren’t discouraged from
participating, but they must
pay the transportation fee for
any additional distance
(anything over 100 miles).
100,000 tons of pellets
The pellet-production
facility will produce 100,000
tons of biomass pellets each
year. This fuel source will be
co-fired at a local utility; five
pounds of pellets will be cofired
with every 100 pounds
of coal burned.
But that’s just Phase One
of the cooperative’s vision. In
Phase Two, Show Me Energy has teamed with Clean Energy
Technologies LLC, a Black and Veatch Corp. company, to
build a biomass-to-liquid fuel facility next door to the
Centerview plant.
This second plant would demonstrate the gasification of
biomass pellets for the production of liquid fuels such as
ethanol, methanol, synthetic diesel, aviation or other fuels.
The team hopes to win a U.S. Department of Energy grant
homegrown
energy produced on
local farms.”
Feedstocks that fit
Another way to think about
this is to use a feedstock that
makes sense for your locale
and process. For rural
producers such as those of
Show Me Energy, that means
agricultural residues.
For those in urban settings,
a more fitting feedstock is
industrial waste, which could
take the form of plastic,
rubber, process heat,
municipal solid waste or food
processing debris.
These are the feedstocks
targeted by Changing World Technologies Inc. (CWT), a
New-York based technology developer that aims to identify
and commercialize energy-efficient and eco-friendly
emerging technologies. The company’s thermal conversion
process technology converts wastes ranging from mixed
plastics to post-consumer tires, food processing waste and
municipal solid waste, to solids, renewable diesel and
specialty chemicals.
In terms of agricultural residues, the
company has done work with manure and
corn stover, as well as a combination of
those types of wastes. The company hasn’t
finished any kind of demonstration plant
design for that material because it’s been
focusing on food processing wastes.
However, it has generated lots of good
data and it will be something they will
build on in the future, says Brian Appel,
chairman and CEO of CWT. The key will
be finding a “champion” to shepherd the
projects forward.
When it comes to the agricultural side
of things, those champions are a little
harder to find, Appel says. “A lot of these
are still individual family farmers, and it’s
much harder to get someone who wants
to be the champion of just that area. It
has to be someone who understands the
big picture in agriculture and has the
resources to go from pilot-plant to a
commercial-demonstration facility.”
Consistency big issue
for industrial waste
In terms of industrial waste — which Appel classifies as a
sub-set of municipal solid waste — the biggest challenge is
not so much finding a champion as it is finding consistent
feedstocks. “With municipal solid waste, you never know
what you’re going to get,” he says. “It’s always changing as
consumer and manufacturing habits change and as efforts to
recycle intensify.”
To circumvent this inconsistency, CWT is working with
large industrial shredder companies — also referred to as
metal recyclers — to design a demonstration plant for the
conversion of shredder residue to fuel.
“Shredder residue is a more consistent feedstock,” Appel
explains. “If you take a refrigerator or a car and send it
through a giant shredder, those companies collect the metal
and the glass.” The leftover material — plastic and rubber
from the tires or the hoses under the hood, or the vinyl seats
and the stuffing in the cushions — is what CWT is focusing
on because it’s more identifiable, he says.
In addition to identifying a consistent source of feedstock,
another challenge to overcome is the hype, Appel says.
“Alternative fuels have been hyped worldwide. One of the
biggest challenges that we’ve had is coming behind other
additives and other alternative fuels,” he says. Therefore,
fixed-energy markets are the first target for CWT. “We’ve
been a proponent of making fixed energy as the place to learn
how to use these fuels because it’s a logical progression to
then go into transportation."
Co-op Vision & Mission
Vision Statement:
Show Me Energy Cooperative has as its guiding vision a commitment to
establish an innovative, profitable, leading model for production of biomassbased
fuels which may be replicated across the country by small producerowned
cooperatives that will provide a positive economic impact on the regions
where they are located.
Mission Statement:
Show Me Energy Cooperative is a nonprofit, producer-owned cooperative
founded to support the development of renewable biomass energy sources in
West Central Missouri through the following actions and efforts:
- Establishment of suitable conditions in the field of energy development which
incorporate the efforts, products and goals of local agricultural biomass
producers;
- Provide additional revenue streams for farmers and producers for their
products by utilization in biomass energy production;
- Support and reinforce the local economy and community through employment
and development of renewable, sustainable technologies;
- Keep member-owners informed about their co-op business, economic,
political, charitable and social environments;
- Help to improve the quality of life, both now and in the forseeable future, in the
areas where Show Me Energy Cooperative has a business, purchasing or
distributing presence.
