Perdue AgriBusiness, Inc., and Fibrowatt LLC, submitted a proposal to the US state of Maryland in response to the State's Clean Bay Power Request for Proposal.
The Fibrowatt/Perdue AgriBusiness proposal calls for a combined heat and power biomass boiler operation at the Perdue AgriBusiness Zion Church Road complex near Salisbury, Md.
The proposed facility will provide 10 megawatts of electricity to the state as well as up to 70,000 pounds per hour of steam to the Perdue AgriBusiness complex. The renewable fuel source will be a combination of poultry litter, layer hen manure, wood chips and other local biomass.
The plant would employ 25, with 180 jobs duirng construciton.
Perdue AgriBusiness currently uses fossil fuel to generate steam, which provides heat during various steps of soybean processing and poultry feed manufacturing. For the past two years a team has conducted review of available technologies to convert poultry litter to energy, meeting with more than 45 companies.
"Our conclusion at this point is that the only commercially viable technology is combustion. The other technologies, while promising to varying degrees, represent a significant risk of project failure compared to combustion," said Perdue AgriBusiness President Dick Willey.
In 2001 Perdue AgriBusiness established a subsidiary, Perdue AgriRecycle, LLC, which converts poultry litter to a pasteurized, pelletized organic fertilizer. This provides poultry growers with an important management alternative for their litter. Since its establishment, Perdue AgriRecycle has shipped approximately 12 million pounds of nitrogen and 7.5 million pounds of phosphorous (P2O5) out of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
Through Perdue AgriRecycle, Perdue AgriBusiness is the largest buyer of poultry litter in Maryland.
Perdue AgriBusiness currently has two biomass boiler operations (using wood, peanut hulls and cotton gin waste) in North Carolina. These are combined heat and power operations providing process steam and electricity.
Fibrowatt's management team has been developing and operating poultry-litter-fueled power plants for a total of 21 years. The company originated in the United Kingdom with the original poultry-powered plant consisting of a small boiler fueled on a test basis with poultry litter to provide heat to a local distillery. Following this first design, a 13 megawatt poultry-litter-fueled power plant in Eye, UK (the world's first) was constructed, and two other plants (14 megawatt and 39 megawatt) were constructed before the team came to the United States.
In 2007, Benson, Minn., became home to the United States' first operating poultry litter plant, the Fibrominn Biomass Power Plant. The 55 megawatt power plant combusts more than 700,000 tons of litter and biomass annually.
"We are excited about this project because it supports agriculture and the environment," said Willey. "It supports both animal agriculture and crop production in Maryland by providing poultry growers an additional management alternative for their poultry litter yet keeping litter, a great fertilizer and soil amendment, available to crop producers for appropriate application.
"Environmentally, this project will remove a significant amount of poultry litter from land application, thereby eliminating the risk of any portion of the nitrogen or phosphorous in this litter or manure from finding its way into the Chesapeake Bay watershed," Willey said.
"The economic and environmental benefits resulting from the proposed project align the interests of the state, environmental groups and the agriculture sector with the U.S. EPA's goals of improving the Chesapeake Bay," said Jim Potter, president and chief operating Officer of Homeland Renewable Energy Inc., the parent company of Fibrowatt. "This proposed project will continue our successful legacy of developing, financing, constructing and operating power projects that combust poultry litter.
"Our Fibrominn plant, located less than ½ mile from the city of Benson, Minn., has never received a single complaint from the local Citizens Advisory Panel. This is testimony to the importance we place on being a good neighbor in any community in which we locate."
The facility will incorporate the use of the most advanced state-of-the-art emissions control systems that have ever been applied to a biomass power plant. The project will, by converting power and steam production from a fossil fuel to a renewable fuel, reduce green house gas emissions by an estimated 165,000 tons of CO2 annually. The ash produced from the combustion of poultry litter will be a valuable fertilizer by-product which will be marketed for broad application in the agricultural sector.
Perdue AgriBusiness is a direct exporter of U.S. agricultural commodities through the company's deepwater port in Chesapeake, Va. Perdue AgriBusiness merchandises grain and oilseeds, processes soybeans, operates protein conversion and blending plants, trades a wide variety of agricultural commodities and refines edible oils.
Source: Cecil Whig
