These two waste-to-energy plants dispose of garbage and produce power – efficiently and with low emissions.

The smell of manure hangs over Greeley as it has for half a century.

These days it’s more than just a potent reminder of the region’s agricultural roots and the hundreds of thousands of cattle raised on the city’s outskirts.

The stench smells like an opportunity.

Investors are lining up to support a planned clean energy park that eventually will convert some of the methane gas released from the manure piles into power for a cheese factory and other businesses. JBS, which runs two of the largest feed yards and the local slaughterhouse, is testing a new technology that heats the cattle excrement and turns it into energy.

Renewed World Energies Corp. has begun work on a five-acre site to turn algae biomass into green diesel and electricity at Georgetown, S.C., with a goal of being in production by late 2010. Between three and four acres of photobioreactors are planned to produce algae-based fuels to generate electrical energy. “The quickest way for generating revenues is in producing electricity,” said Rick Armstrong, co-founder of RWE. He and fellow co-founder Tim Tompkins unveiled their system at the Algae Biomass Summit in San Diego, Calif., the first week of October.

When life hands you enough onions, you can apparently power 600kw worth of fuel cells with the results. Gills onions, the largest processor in the US, is powering its plant with waste it used to pay someone to dispose of—and saving over $1 million a year in the process.

Food waste is one of the least recycled materials in municipal solid waste systems, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But at least one organization in the San Francisco Bay Area is trying to change that.

The East Bay Municipal Utility District is experimenting with innovative techniques to convert raw food waste into usable energy, taking some of the massive amounts of food waste generated by local restaurants and using it to power its operations in Oakland, Calif.

In 2007, EBMUD was awarded a $50,000 grant from the EPA as part of the Resource Recovery Program to explore new ways of digesting food waste to produce methane gas.

Today, the facility is home to a million-dollar facility that is generating usable methane and producing nearly 100 percent of the power needed to operate the regional wastewater treatment operation.

Select from Six Presentation Categories:

• Crop Residues
• Dedicated Energy Crops
• Forest & Wood Processing Residues
• Livestock & Poultry Wastes
• MSW & Urban Wastes
• Food Processing Residues

In the agreement, filed in federal court in Columbus, Ohio and joined by the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, Ohio Edison will repower the R.E. Burger Units 4 and 5 near Shadyside, Ohio with biomass fuel.  The consent decree modifies a 2005 consent decree requiring Ohio Edison to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) at several of its coal-fired plants.

The modified consent decree will substantially reduce emissions of SO2 and NOx from Burger’s current levels and also reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from current levels by more than 1.3 million tons a year.  Burger will be the largest coal-fired electric utility plant in the country to repower with renewable biomass fuels and the first such plant at which greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced under a Clean Air Act consent decree.

The original 2005 consent decree resolved a lawsuit filed in 1999 under the New Source Review provisions of the Clean Air Act regarding Ohio Edison’s W. H. Sammis plant and required that the company reduce SO2 emissions not only at Sammis but also at several of its smaller plants, including Burger.  That agreement gave Ohio Edison three options to reduce Burger’s SO2 emissions:  shut down the plant, install a scrubber, or repower with natural gas.  Under the modified agreement, Ohio Edison will repower Burger beginning in 2012 with mostly biomass fuels, co-firing with not more than 20 percent low sulfur coal, including natural wood from waste tree trimmings and dedicated sustainable nurseries, agricultural crops, grasses and vegetation waste or products.

Following a year of initial operation and optimization, the Burger plant will be subject to enforceable emissions rates for SO2, NOx and particulate matter (PM).  Reductions from current levels of SO 2  emissions are expected to be as much as 14,000 tons a year; for NOx, as much as 1300 tons a year; and for PM, as much as 700 tons a year.

As a result of this agreement, conversion to biomass fuel combustion is expected to approach “carbon neutrality,” meaning that CO2 emissions released by burning biomass fuel will be offset by the amount of CO 2  absorbed from the atmosphere by the wood and vegetation grown to produce the fuel.  After offset, Burger is expected to emit approximately 400,000 tons of CO 2  emissions a year, based on 20 percent coal co-firing, versus more than 1.7 million tons from coal-fired combustion prior to repowering with biomass fuel.

The adverse effects on the environment of CO2 emissions, particularly from coal-fired power plants, are well-documented.  Last April, EPA issued the “Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under the Clean Air Act,” which identified the dangers of the current and projected concentrations of the six key greenhouse gases, the most significant being carbon dioxide.  In addition, sulfur dioxides, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter cause severe respiratory problems and contribute to childhood asthma.  They are also significant contributors to acid rain, smog and haze, which impair visibility in national parks.

“This is a great result for the health and the environment of the nation,” said John C. Cruden, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.  “We are pleased that Ohio Edison has chosen to significantly reduce greenhouse gases and other pollutants from the Burger plant and hope that Ohio Edison will become the standard-bearer for other companies considering conversion to renewable biomass fuels under the auspices of the EPA and state environmental agencies.”

“Today’s settlement improves air quality for the local community and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by requiring the use of a renewable, carbon-neutral fuel to generate electricity,” said Cynthia Giles, Assistant Administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.  “EPA will seek similar commitments from companies to replace coal-fired electric generation with cleaner, renewable energy in future Clean Air Act settlements.”

The consent decree, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, is subject to a 30-day public comment period and approval by the federal court.  A copy of the consent decree is available on the Department of Justice Web site at http://www.usdoj.gov/enrd/Consent_Decrees.html .

Tops and tails are becoming much more than garbage at Gills Onions, an onion processor in Oxnard, Calif. Today marks the unveiling of the company’s onion-powered electrical system, a first-of-its-kind initiative to turn onion waste into energy.

San Francisco became the one of the first cities and counties in the country to adopt a mandatory recycling and composting ordinance for every building.

The ordinance was aimed in part at capturing food scraps entering the waste stream and turning it into a rich soil benefiting area farmers, rather than clogging up the local landfill.

Now that unwanted, thrown away food will soon find new life as electricity. The East Bay Municipal District (EBMUD), which supplies water and wastewater treatment to parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, plans to dramatically boost the amount of food scraps it converts to energy from 90 tons per week to 1,000 tons, or 200 tons per weekday.

Waste gasification, a process for converting garbage into fuel and electricity without incinerating it, may be a step closer to large-scale commercialization. Last week, Houston’s Waste Management, a major garbage-collection and -disposal company, announced a joint venture with InEnTec, a startup based in Richland, WA, to commercialize InEnTec’s plasma-gasification technology.

A study published today in Science concludes that, on average, using biomass to produce electricity is 80 percent more efficient than transforming the biomass into biofuel. In addition, the electricity option would be twice as effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The results imply that investment in an ethanol infrastructure, even if based on more efficient cellulosic processes, may prove misguided. The study was done by a collaboration between researchers at Stanford University, the Carnegie Institute of Science, and the University of California, Merced.

The newly funded Center for Lignocellulose Structure and Formation at Pennsylvania State University will be home to investigations into plant cells to produce better biomass fuels. The U.S. DOE will fund the center with $21 million for over five years as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, according to the university.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have published a paper on their work with a bacteria and a yeast that have the potential to become a truly feedstock flexible process producing an intermediate chemical new to the biomass industry. Christopher Voigt, an associate professor in pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF, was the principle investigator for the paper, “Synthesis of Methyl Halides from Biomass Using Engineered Microbes,” published online April 20 by the Journal of the American Chemical Society. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja809461u

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. The phrase should carry deep, metaphorical meaning and not be reflective of a man literally finding a broken toilet seat and making bank. But here we are in 2009, and anything is possible.

Despite having been long detested, landfills have in recent years benefited from numerous subsidies that help turn the natural gas byproduct of decaying material in landfills into energy. According to the Environmental Industry Association and EPA, on a daily basis, 1, 440 megawatts worth of electricity and 310 million cubic meters of landfill gas were delivered by these “green” landfills. And new projects to harvest the methane gas continue to pop up.

The 74-acre, 300,000-square-foot Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, Fla., is planning to build a new hands-on educational exhibit about energy that will feature renewable energies and be built around a proposed six-megawatt biomass gasification plant to provide power for the museum.

According to Wit Ostrenko, president of the Hillsborough County, Fla.-owned MOSI, the museum plans to submit a request for proposals from developers who would be interested in building a gasification plant at the proposed $14 million Energy Center exhibit which will occupy a 10,000-square-foot building on 3 to 5 acres on the museum campus. The gasification plant will include an educational component so that visitors can see and understand how the gasification plant works and how biomass gasification is more beneficial than burning fossil fuels.

• Acid Trip
• Switchgrass: A Bioplastic Factory
• Plastics From the Prairie
• Proving Out Plasma Gasification
• Betting on Biobricks
• Renewable Hydrogen: Another Option for Future Generations

• Powerful Relationships-It’s the Talk of Tualco Valley
• Building Better Energy Crops
• Trash Tactics in Iraq
• Giving Back
• Waste Not, Want Not
• Power and Fuel From Plastic Wastes
• Determining the Ownership of Landfill Gas
• Knocking Down the Dust
• Sustainability of Biofuels: Future Generations

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), one of America’s most important national science labs, has signed an $89 million energy savings performance contract with Johnson Controls, Inc. to apply advanced energy conservation solutions and to build a biomass gasification system with a ’super boiler’ to power its campuses. Being the most competitive and reliable of all renewable energy systems, the biomass power plant will reduce the lab’s fossil fuel requirements by 80% and, in combination with conservation efforts, push down energy costs dramatically.

In the latest development of large-scale biomass energy production, the Netherlands is now home to the world’s largest biomass power plant running only on – yep, you got it – chicken manure. Though biomass energy schemes are hardly anything new, (see these “power to the people” projects in California, China, India and Uganda) it’s a matter of scale and the plant’s dual objective to provide an alternative source of energy, while tackling a serious problem: namely, the high environmental impact of an excess stream of chicken droppings.

• Dealing With Disaster Debris
• Furfural: Future Feedstock for Fuels and Chemicals
• Is Biomass Harvesting Sustainable?
• Oceans of Biomass
• Biomass, Wind, Coal, Hydro, Petroleum …
• Building Sustainable Communities
• Applying Patents in the Developing Biomass Industry

In one of its boldest green initiatives yet, Neenah Paper has contracted to convert wood and fiber waste into steam energy to power its largest fine paper mill. The Neenah Green: Change Comes from Within environmental campaign gave impetus to the development of broader mill-based solutions such as this state-of-the-art facility. Located at the company’s Whiting Mill, the fossil fuel-free steam energy system will be built by Vision Power, a Florida-based independent energy services company, and is scheduled for completion in the third quarter of 2009.

Researchers at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory are studying the co-gasification process in which various types of coal and biomass are combined and converted into synthesis gas for use in producing electricity, hydrogen, chemicals and liquid transportation fuels. The biomass includes energy crops such as wheat straw, corn stover, switchgrass, mixed hardwood and distillers’ dried grains with corn fiber, and even algae. Using coal in co-gasification provides a steady supply that can be supplemented by biomass whenever available. The researchers are examining how best to couple the coals and biomasses that makes sense geographically. They are using a small-scale gasification system to evaluate various products.

During the 1980s, East Coast cities efforts to deal with trash could have been a comedy of errors if they weren’t such a serious problem. In one story still told in waste management circles today, a barge filled with more than 3,000 tons of trash sailed between New York City and Belize for more than six months while city officials tried to find a landfill to take the waste.

Things are different now. Although the amount of waste the United States generates each day rose by about one pound per person between 1980 and 2006, increased recycling and recover rates meant the amount headed to landfills decreased by about a pound as well. Still, 138.2 million tons of waste are sent to the nation’s 1,754 operating landfills annually. Seattle alone sends a mile-long train filled with garbage to Oregon every day.

On the West Coast, there’s an estimated1.5 million tons of capacity left in the region’s landfills, which currently accept 64 million tons of waste annually. That’s enough to last about 24 years.

However, landfill operators are now finding new ways to increase landfill capacity — and also limit environmentally and financially costly problems after a landfill is closed — by turning to waste-to-energy technologies that have finally come of age.

Around the world, pockets of land lie fallow that could help meet the world’s ever-growing energy demands. Some of this former agricultural land was once pasture grazed by cattle, and some was cropland that was abandoned for greener fields or because of changing needs. Now, research published in ES&T (DOI 10.1021/es800052w ) maps abandoned agricultural land worldwide and finds enough available to grow crops for ethanol or other energy uses to meet up to 8% of the world’s current energy demand. Most importantly, planting these crops would not take away land now used to grow food and would not contribute to deforestation.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) will co-sponsor an international conference on “Accelerating Innovation in 21st Century Biosciences: Identifying the Measurement Standards and Technological Challenges,” Oct. 19-22, 2008, at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md. The conference goal is to identify and prioritize measurement, standards and technology needs currently creating barriers to innovation — and impeding full realization of the societal and economic benefits of new discoveries in the biosciences.

The conference will focus on:

• Agriculture — increasing yield, quality and safety in the world’s food supply;
• Energy — obtaining sustainable energy from biological sources;
• Environment — understanding our planet through linking molecules to ecosystems;
• Manufacturing — obtaining higher quality products through better bioprocess measurements; and
• Medicine — improving health through measurement of complex biological signatures.

The conference is designed to yield a detailed “road map” list of measurement, standards and technology needs that will inform and guide researchers at NIST, as well as others in the measurement and standards communities worldwide.

High food prices, concern over dwindling supplies of fossil fuels and the desire for clean, renewable energy have led many to seek ways to make ethanol out of cellulosic sources such as wood, hay and switchgrass. But today’s processes are notoriously inefficient. In a new paper,* researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have detailed some of the most fundamental processes involved in extracting sugars from biomass, the first step in producing ethanol by fermentation. Their findings should help engineers to improve their process designs in order to extract the maximum amount of fuel from a given measure of biomass.

• Flexible Biomass Conveyance
• Building Better Biofuels
• Sprucing Up Wood Waste
• Breaking Through to the Other Side of Biofuels
• Cleansing and Reforming Syngas
• A Sweet Energy Source
• Green Acres is the Place to Be
• A Multi-Prong Approach to Carbon Neutrality

Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has released a 50-page document containing guidelines for harvesting woody biomass for alternative energy sources.

With spiking oil prices making businesses and homeowners wonder how they’ll budget for winter heating, the prospect of growing renewable fuel in nearby farm fields is ever more tantalizing. This hope for a local, renewable fuel source is what prompted Middlebury College to develop a test site on the outskirts of campus to explore the feasibility of fast-growing willow shrubs as biomass. The college will open a new biomass plant on campus in December, 2008, replacing half of its more than 2 million gallons of fuel oil with regionally-grown wood chips.

As the world watches China prepare for the 2008 summer Olympics, London is preparing for its chance to show the world what it’s capable of when the city hosts the 2012 summer Olympics.

Paris-based Suez Energy Services was recently awarded a $178 million contract for its subsidiary Elyo to build, finance and operate two energy centers that will use biomass to power the Olympic Park and its surrounding areas during the Olympics, as well as for communities developed after 2012.

Ground cover may be one workable method to reduce the effects of erosion that future biomass harvests are predicted to bring. Iowa State University researchers are looking at ways to use ground cover, a living grass planted between the rows of corn, in production farming.

In this era of climate change, of the need to maintain biodiversity and of the growing reliance on agriculture for the production of energy and renewable materials, land-use choices need ever more careful scrutiny. What happens to species and the carbon cycle when we convert ‘wild’ land to farmland? And vice versa, what are the effects when we pay farmers to take farmland out of production for conservation? A commonly held view is that the conservation of land and the plants that thrive on it, is good for both carbon sequestration and biodiversity. However, a new study shows that this is not necessarily the case. Things are indeed far more complex.

Scientists from a range of U.S. universities built a case study around these questions. They found that paying rural landowners in Oregon’s Willamette Basin to protect at-risk animals won’t necessarily mean that their newly conserved trees and plants will absorb more carbon from the atmosphere, and vice versa.

This week, city counselors in Ottawa, Ontario, unanimously approved a new waste-to-energy facility that will turn 400 metric tons of garbage per day into 21 megawatts of net electricity–enough to power about 19,000 homes. Rather than burning trash to generate heat, as with an incinerator, the facility proposed by Ottawa-based PlascoEnergy Group employs electric-plasma torches to gasify the municipal waste and enlist the gas to generate electricity.

Saving on fuel isn’t a question of conservation for the military. It’s about saving lives.

The U.S. Army is testing two prototype generators in Iraq that run on garbage, rather than diesel fuel.

The Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery (TGER, pronounced “tiger”), was co-developed with Purdue University and deployed in May at Victory Base camp in Baghdad, where it will be tested until August.

• Breakthroughs in Green Gasoline Production
• Grass: It’s Not Just for Grazing
• Sizing-Up Anaerobic Digestion
• Pellet Properties
• Feeding it Back
• Anaerobic Organisms Key to Coskata’s Rapid Rise
• Eyes on the North: Canada Ramps Up Bioenergy Activity
• From the Lab to Production: Direct Steam Injection Heating of Fibrous Slurries
• Under Pressure Underground: Gravity Pressure Vessels Convert Waste into Biofuels

After a close examination of crude oil made from pig manure, chemists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are certain about a number of things.

Most obviously, “This stuff smells worse than manure,” says NIST chemist Tom Bruno.

But a job’s a job, so the NIST team has developed the first detailed chemical analysis revealing what processing is needed to transform pig manure crude oil into fuel for vehicles or heating. Mass production of this type of biofuel could help consume a waste product overflowing at U.S. farms, and possibly enable cutbacks in the nation’s petroleum use and imports. But, according to a new NIST paper (L.S. Ott, B.L. Smith and T.J. Bruno. “Advanced distillation curve measurement: Application to a bio-derived crude oil prepared from swine manure”. Fuel (2008), doi:10.1016/j.fuel.2008.04.038.) , pig manure crude will require a lot of refining.

If fry grease can run a Mercedes, why can’t it power the restaurant it came from?

That’s the idea behind Owl Power Company’s Vegawatt power system, a machine that converts a restaurant’s waste oil into electricity and hot water.

• Biofuels in the Future
• Solar-Powered Biomass Gasification
• The Power of Association
• Pledging Allegiance to Renewable Energy
• Blending Aesthetics & ENERGY
• Assessing the Impact of Mexico’s Biofuels Law
• The Breakdown on Anaerobic Digestion
• Woody biomass grants aim to expand use of forest waste
• Advanced biofuel projects receive DOE funding

IT hosting company Rackspace has announced it has completed the conversion of a former warehouse into its new data center that will receive its power from renewable energy sources from the UK’s largest dedicated biomass energy plant. Operated by Scottish and Southern Energy, the plant is a combined heat and power plant that uses wood chips, waste paper and fiber fuel to generate electricity, hot water and steam.

• Commercial Biorefinery Update
• Biobutanol: The Next Big Biofuel?
• Gas Naturally
• Using Peter Rabbit to Clean Peter’s Pond
• Big Wood
• Coordinating Biomass Research
• A Solution for Greater Biomass Utilization

• The Beauty of Biomass Briquettes
• Seeing the Forest for the Trees
• Managing Woody Biomass
• Northwestern Ingenuity Takes SHAPE
• Organizing Biomass Farmers
• National Forest Slash Piles Eyed for Fuel
• Construction Waste to Biomass to Energy & Back Again
• Freshly Squeezed Ethanol Feedstock
• What to do with the Remnants of a Plastic Culture
• Developing Yeast Strains for Biomass-to-Ethanol Production
• Refueling Today’s Military: Reducing the Dependence on Oil, Part Two

U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer and U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman recently announced that combined, the departments will invest up to $18.4 million, over three years, for 21 biomass research and development (R&D), and demonstration projects.

If scientists are successful, America could someday derive as much as one-half of its transportation fuels from biomass such as crop wastes, leaves and wood.

Pacific Gas and Electric and BioEnergy Solutions say that their biogas-to-pipeline injection project in Fresno County has begun producing renewable natural gas derived from animal waste. It is the first project in California that will deliver pipeline-quality, renewable natural gas to a utility.

Cramahe Township dairy farmer Bob McComb thinks the township should look at biodigesters before it moves forward with an expensive pipeline to move treated sewage out into Lake Ontario.

The innovative Cramahe resident knows of one biodigester converting farm waste into heat operating in eastern Ontario.

A biodigester takes waste and subjects it to microbes called achaebacteria. A biodigester uses heat to break down organic matter such as manure, waste products from livestock operations, waste grain products and municipal wastes. Bacteria interact with the waste and break it down into processed organic matter – biogas and liquid fertilizer.

The biogas can be burned to produce heat and electricity. The micro-organisms in the waste are killed in the process where temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Celsius.

Behind the manicured lawns and spotless streets of the U.S. Marine Corps Recruiting Depot on San Diego Harbor rises a gleaming maze of pipes and towers. It’s a 25-megawatt combined heat and power (CHP) electricity plant that recycles its exhaust.

• All Roads Lead to Rome and Rice
• Cool, Hot and Green
• Lukewarm on Cofiring
• Agricultural Versus Industrial Waste for Energy
• Straw Tiger
• Designing for the Need: Effective Biomass Gasification
• DOE signs MOU with USDA and China, awards biofuels grants
• Eco-flavored chips: Zero trans fat, zero carbon footprint
• Switchgrass, mixed grass research projects advance

Using biomass fuel on a massive scale in combination with carbon sequestration could return atmospheric carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels within decades, according to a new analysis.

Peter Read calls his proposal global gardening. To make it work, an area the size of France and Germany would have to be enlisted for growing biomass fuels for a quarter of a century .

Gov. Jennifer Granholm is heading to Washington, D.C., where she will update federal Energy Department officials about a proposed venture that would turn pulp and paper mill waste into fuel.