Reduce, reuse, recycle. The three Rs have been the mantra of ecological thinking almost as long as our concept of sustainability has existed. According to BIOFerm Energy Systems, it’s time to add a fourth R – resource.
The international company BIOFerm provides clean renewable energy solutions by designing and constructing biogas plants to recover energy from organic waste and biomass. Originally conceived as a way for farmers to recoup losses from excess crops, a BIOFerm biogas plant can serve anyone that creates 6,000 tons of organic waste in a year. Not just farms. According to Caroline Chappell of BIOFerm USA, a biogas plant “could be based at a university, a composting facility, a food processor – any producer of organic waste who is looking for alternatives to the landfill.”
BIOFerm biogas generates heat through direct processing in a boiler. This is incredibly efficient, as up to 98% of the energy input can be transferred into thermal power through use in a direct processing boiler. Creating electricity is less efficient: biogas is run through a combined heat and power generator (CHP), which has a conversion rate of only 40%. The electricity can be used by the plant owner for internal use or it can be delivered into the public grid. Biogas can also be processed into biomethane by removing the carbon dioxide and other trace impurities. Biomethane serves as a substitute for natural gas and can be injected into a utility’s natural gas pipeline.
Aside from offering a carbon neutral, on-demand source of heat, electricity and fuel, biogas offers businesses another incentive – it qualifies for renewable energy certificates (since biomass is considered a renewable source) as well as carbon credit due to reduction of greenhouse gases. Campuses can utilize the biogas plants for hands-on green curriculum. Real estate companies sign on in part because using biogas helps attract socially-conscious tenants and buyers, just as corporations are becoming more aware of the importance of good corporate sustainability reporting (CSR), not to mention long-term savings in energy costs. And, of course, there’s the obvious reduction on organic waste volume, which helps everyone.
BIOFerm began in Germany in 2000, when a farmer and his business partner saw an opportunity to work with growers toward converting crop residuals into energy through anaerobic digestion. The process of biofermentation offered a way to utilize previously-useless material – material that might even require costly removal. Since then, BIOFerm, now a subsidiary of the Viessman Group, an international leader in heating system manufacturing, has built over 30 plants in Europe and moved into the US market in 2007.
Making a project happen isn’t always easy, though. BIOFerm often encounters a potential client who may have a site and permits in place, but no raw material (or feedstock). Or, a client might have long-term feedstock contracts in place but reside in a region where permitting is difficult and land acquisition is costly. Relying on feedstock poses challenges of seasonality – a food processor may have thousands of tons of material, but only 3 months out of the year. Sometimes, proximity presents the biggest problem – is it worth the diesel cost and emissions to truck material to a biogas plant from 20 miles away, or should it just head to the landfill 2 miles away?
They haven’t let logistics slow things down. According to Chappell, “Construction is well underway for our first US project at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, which should be up and running this summer.” That plant, she says, will be capable of processing up to 8000 tons per year of feedstock and has an electrical capacity of 370 kW.
BIOFerm is joined in the biomass and biochemical pursuit by a host of companies, and there’s only space enough here to name a few. Amyris has engineered yeast that produces petroleum substitutes. BlueFire Ethanol creates ethanol from organic waste through concentrated acid hydrolysis. Coskata utilizes a dual-process of gasification and biofermentation to produce ethanol. Mascoma has engineered yeast and bacteria to break down cellulose and ferment the resulting sugars. OPX Biotechnologies creates a bioacryllic that replaces petroleum-based acrylic. Qteros has a specialized Q Microbe, able to process a broad array of biomass and ferment all sugars into ethanol. Solazyme converts biomass into oil using microalgae, most notably for jet fuel (a story we covered a few months ago). ZeaChem’s pairing of biochemical fermentation and thermochemical processing yields 40% more than other cellulosic processes.
It’s an exciting time for biomass technology, so look for more from BIOFerm USA and other companies in the near future. “We would like to continue to expand our presence in the US biogas market by building more plants,” says Chappell. To that end, BIOFerm is partnering with Cedar Grove Composting in Everett, WA to build a biogas plant capable of processing 50,000 tons per year of source-separated organics. Steady strides for a company rethinking resource.
