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| Last updated at 2:25 PM on 13/11/08 |
ACA to convert chicken manure into liquid energy 
KITCHENER, ONTARIO
BY JIM ROMAHN
Farm Focus
By the end of December, Dr. Peter Fransham of Ottawa expects that ACA Cooperative in New Minas, Nova Scotia will be converting chicken manure into liquid energy.
He has spent decades researching how to use pyrolysis to capture the energy in poultry litter so that energy can be stored and released later by burning what he calls biooil.
Dr. Fransham said it’s similar to propane and can be used like diesel fuel or furnace oil.
About half of the weight and volume of poultry litter converts to energy, he said. What’s left is good fertilizer.
But he conceded during questioning at the 37th annual Poultry Innovations Conference here recently that it will only pay if the poultry litter is valued at zero and the farmer provides, rather than hires, the labour.
Dr. Fransham spent two years developing a pilot plant in Alabama where poultry barns typically have 22,000 chickens and no land to dispose of the manure, he said. It’s easy to understand why they are keenly interested.
The Nova Scotia plant is going up in an abandoned hog facility in Berwick and will be capable of handling one tonne of litter per day, yielding about 100 gallons of biooil per day.
He said pyrolysis requires litter that’s 10 to 15 per cent moisture, so it needs to be dried. The dryer can be run with energy from the system. He said one of the challenges has been controlling dust.
He said the most economical size of plant would process 50 tonnes of litter per day.
What comes from pryolysis are charcoal, gas and biooil. The charcoal is used as fertilizer, the gas to generate heat and the biooil can be taken burned for heat or taken another step to gasification and then electrical power and heat.
The pyrolysis is achieved using steel balls heated to 400 degrees Celsius, then adding the poultry litter. It’s an anaerobic process – i.e. no oxygen and therefore no burning.
Gasification requires heating to 800ºC, Fransham said. He’s researching that step because biooil has an offensive odour.
He is building four other plants this year—near Ottawa, in New Zealand, Arizona and at the Saskatchewan Research Council.
He said the next challenge is to modify biooil to be diesel fuel. Biooil has about two-thirds the value of number two diesel, he said.
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13/11/08
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