Grinding biomass bales at the Landfill

For several years, POET has been working with farmers around Emmetsburg, Iowa to collect corn crop residue. That residue will be the feedstock for POET's cellulosic ethanol plant that will be constructed by 2013. In the meantime, many of the residue bales are being ground at the Sioux Falls Landfill and sent to POET Biorefining - Chancellor (S.D.) where they burned in a solid fuel boiler to make process steam for the ethanol plant. This is footage of the landfill grinder at work. For more information, go to http://www.poet.com

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• biomass
• bales
• landfill
• energy
• power
• ethanol
• biofuels
• Sioux Falls
• South Dakota

[poettv]

As the statements about soil quality, the ISU data is consistent so far with other research done on the topic in Iowa and other parts of the country. We work to find all relevant research on the matter, and it would be helpful if you cite the research to which you're referring.

[poettv]

Thanks for the comments. The stover is actually being harvested for our cellulosic ethanol project. We don't expect farmers to be able to go from not harvesting any stover to harvesting 270,000 in one year, so we are getting the harvest system in place prior to commercialization.

Since the cellulosic plant isn't scheduled to start up until 2013, we are using the stover from these initial harvests for research and other uses, such as the solid fuel boiler in Chancellor.

[DeepThought42a]

How does it make sense to buy 56,000 tons of corn stover when you can only use 1 ton per day? Then you load bales on trucks, haul it to the Sioux Falls landfill, unload them to be fed into a grinder, reloaded on trucks, and hauled to a plant where the residue is made into giant piles. Who is the genius that thought this up? I smell Obama money in this. You should be ashamed of yourselves and the college professors who started this farce.

[DeepThought42a]

The concern is that excessive sodium acts as a dispersant of soil particles, degrading aggregation.

[DeepThought42a]

Farmers commonly report that the long-term use of synthetic fertilizers, especially anhydrous ammonia, leads to soil compaction and poor tilth. The potential harmful effects from KCl can be surmised from in the salt concentration of the material. Sodium nitrate is another high salt fertilizer. Because of the relatively low nitrogen content of sodium nitrate, a high amount of sodium is added to the soil when normal applications of nitrogen are made with this material.

[DeepThought42a]

Iowa State University and the University of Wisconsin are using JUNK SCIENCE in determining that it's wonderful to take 25% of remaining corn stover off the land. Anything taken out of the soil must be replaced to balance the structure. Structure can be destroyed readily through our choice to remove stover. It must be replaced with appropriate amounts of fertilizer, increasing the salt content of soil over the long term.