 We will hear from from Dan Henry who is the vice president chief technical officer for heart and home technologies Thank you Carol How many in this room know anything about raisin chickens? Cool How many this room want to see a safe 22 million barrels of oil a year. I'm gonna show you how we can do it The chicken industry the poultry industry turkeys hog barns dairy barns egg laying hens all need heat and Traditionally about 85% of those operations use propane Now how many in this room know that propane is a really great transportation fuel? It'll burn in the car or bus Buses here are natural gas propane is what pretty close to natural gas So why are we using? Hundreds of millions of gallons of propane a year The heat chickens when we should be using biomass When you use propane Because there's five quarts of water and every gallon of propane is generated through the combustion process Most of the propane heat is unvented and it puts that water in a chicken house And that wet water moist air blends with the litter and creates ammonia And you put these one day old baby chicks who can make no body heat for the first ten days their lives into a really strong ammonia Atmosphere and these little baby chicks have never had a bite of food or drink of water until the day they're put in there Now those baby chicks for the first ten days of their life can make nobody heat So the floor of that house has to be about 93 degrees and they have to keep that house warm and Progressively reduce the temperature until the chick is ten days old So they're using a lot of propane This is the value of pellet heat the confined feeding of chickens turkeys hogs and Consumes between 18 and 22 million barrels of oil in thermal energy equivalency via propane The average chicken house to consume between six and eight thousand gallons of propane per year There's over ninety thousand broiler houses. That's the size chicken. You get it Kentucky fried They grow about twenty eight to thirty two thousand chicks from a baby chick to three point two pound broiler weight in six weeks the LP emits twelve point five pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon or 4.7 tons per year per house the Chicken houses emit forty four hundred and twenty three thousand tons of CO2 a year and Every six thousand gallons of LP used at seven thousand five hundred gallons of water to the chicken house The wet litter Causes extremely high ammonia levels and did you know our country exports a hundred and twenty five million dollars where the chicken feed a year to China You ever been to China? You see a lot of food with with chicken feed in it Now we can only export the feet that aren't burned from the ammonia and Currently we only harvest about twenty percent because the balance gets burned from the wet litter We can double or quadruple our exports of chicken feet to China, and that would be a good thing All right The the ammonia also creates poor quality for the workers Now when you take the price of pellets and you take the price of LP Per BTU cost of pellet energy is half of what LP is So when they convert a barn from propane heat to dry heat from from wood pellets, and they can be agricultural pellets You cut their energy dollar costs by fifty percent, but there's another big gain here Now that you aren't creating all that ammonia You don't have to turn on these huge exhaust fans one or two minutes out of five to get the ammonia out of the room Which means they're not throwing all that energy away anymore Now that they're not throwing half their energy away anymore You've got their energy consumption by half Suddenly you're saving them seventy five percent of their energy cost per house All right What to replace? 6,000 gallons of propane requires 32 tons of pellets There's a savings of seven thousand two hundred and ten dollars a year In just BTU to BTU energy cost The other thing that happens is this flock scores higher Your ticens your produce your pilgrims your cargills They contract a grower and they get paid on the score of the flock The higher the score the closer to the premium purchase price they get Most growers are lucky to achieve a 90 percentile The flocks that we've been turning out with the dry heat have been achieving as high as a hundred and three percent All right, there is a five point improvement in feed conversion because the baby chicks has a healthier lung and we have a Much much improved quality of air for the people that work in there And the neighborhoods that these barns are in and the valleys are in don't stink anymore It'll create several thousand jobs to produce the two million eight hundred thousand tons of pellets To replace and offset the propane that's currently be used And all that propane can be used for transportation fuel So any questions I must say I don't know about what you guys are doing I don't know about you guys, but I find this whole area absolutely fascinating in terms of thinking about all the things that can actually be done And you'll never think about chickens the same way again. Will you? our next speaker will be Melissa van Ornhem who is the marketing manager for GHD? Incorporated and so she also will be talking about One of my favorite thing I appreciate that As she said, my name is Melissa van Ornhem. I'm with GHD. We're an anaerobic digester company based in Wisconsin so you just heard a lot of great information about chickens and we have one anaerobic digester on a poultry operation but the Majority of our systems are on dairy farms. So you heard about chickens and now you're gonna hear about cows For those of you that aren't familiar with anaerobic digestion you can think of it literally as a big cow stomach So we are growing the same kind of bacteria that you would find in the cow stomach Cow stomach is an anaerobic Digester anaerobic means no oxygen So what happens is is we take the manure and we put it into our big concrete vessel and we hold it for 22 days in our Big stomach and we keep it at 100 degrees same temperature as the cow Again growing the same kind of bacteria and those bacteria do a lot of work for us They break down the long chains of proteins and carbohydrates and such that are in the manure And when they break those long carbon chains into smaller chains They release energy in the form of biogas and that biogas in our case is about 58 percent methane and 42 percent CO2 So what we do is we take that biogas off of the digester and in the majority of cases in our projects We're taking that biogas and running it to engines and the engines are burning the methane in the biogas and They're also Doing another great thing for us They're also burning the odor off the farm at the same time and then the engines power a generator which produce electricity So we have farmers all around the country now who are selling all this power that they're creating from their manure I'm putting it right out on to the utility We also have some other benefits from the system after the manure has been in the digester for 22 days We pump it out of the digester and we send it to a separator a mechanical separator And we have a solid and a liquid that comes off that separator and they both have a lot of value to our dairy farmers So the solid Looks nothing like manure. It's very fluffy and light and similar to peat moss in consistency And our dairy farmers have found that it's a wonderful bedding for the animals So those of you that aren't too familiar with the dairy industry a lot of them spend the majority of their time in barns which are made of concrete They have concrete floors So they'll put some kind of bedding down on the concrete for the cows to lie on because believe it or not It's when the cows are lying down when they're producing the milk So the farmers want comfortable cows lying down all the time so they make more milk So instead of putting sawdust down in the barns or sand They're now using the solids from the digester and they found that it's really good for herd health Lower mastitis rates a lot of benefits to it and the cows love it So that's one use for the solids the farmers will generally produce Double the amount of cells that they need for their barns So they have the 50% surplus where they can either sell it to other dairy farmers We'll also use it as bedding or you could sell it as fertilizer When you separate about 35% of the phosphorus goes with the salads and about 25% of the nitrogen So it's a very good bedding material. I'm sorry fertilizer material weed seeds are killed So if you want a product for your garden, this is it And then the liquid off of that separator is now going into the lagoons that the farmers already have in their operation The benefit to the liquid now though is the bacteria Will convert the nutrients from an organic to an inorganic form? so if you think back to your School days when you're talking about photosynthesis and science class You'll remember that it was inorganic nutrients that the plants can utilize to grow So when manure comes out of the animal, it's primarily organic in nature. So the nutrients are organic when a farmer spreads Raw manure, it actually takes the soil bacteria One two three maybe even four years to fully convert the nutrients to an inorganic form And once it's inorganic then it's plant accessible So that's why a lot of farmers are spreading manure raw manure in March or November Because you have a hard time spreading it onto a growing crop because it can burn the plant and kill it So now the bacteria do us the great benefit of speeding that process up So the waste coming out of the digester is now inorganic in nature. So you can put it right onto a growing crop So our farmers now are holding their liquid and they're spreading it Right now all through the summer right on the corn right on the alfalfa They're greatly increasing the crop yield greatly reducing the likelihood of runoff very little odor when they spread because again we're Getting rid of the odor when we burn the biogas in the engine. So neighbors are very excited when a digester goes in So there's lots of really good benefits to the system. We also do a good job of pathogen kill So E. Coli for example, we're doing over 99% kill of E. Coli Staff and strup are a little bit tougher, but we're in the 90s with them. So God forbid if there was Maneur that got onto some spinach for example, nobody's going to get sick We also do a good job of reducing BOD and COD level levels So again, God forbid if it got into a stream, you're not going to kill the fish So there's a lot of environmental benefits to the digester above and beyond the renewable electricity that I think are really important for Every person this country to know so the other good thing is that it's providing a Stable revenue source for our farmers as some of you may know We are coming out of a two-year period where the dairy farmers were Unfortunately getting a very low price for their milk It was a difficult time for our dairy farmers in this country And we had a lot of our customers coming to us and saying thank goodness We had the digester because it was stable revenue for us And we knew that we would get through the low point and get through the storm in the dairy industry So it helped them ride the volatility in there in their market So high-level that's what we're doing with our digester technology And now you will never think about common or the same way again So think about how important this last session is In terms of all of these things that you will never think about in the same way And I think also what is very very cool in terms of what we're hearing again Are all of the synergies all of the different kinds of products that we're getting at the same time while we're also solving problems and In terms of thinking about odor and runoff as well as backing out a fossil fuel And so to wrap this panel up to kind of put it all together is Nora Goldstein who is a board member of the American Biogas Council No, I It being the last speaker of of the day I could stand here and sing about biogas or make poems about biogas, but instead I'll just tell you Try to speak quickly and you'll never think the same way about let's see we had chickens and Cows and now we're gonna I'm gonna segue over into sewage sludge human waste and food waste So you're never gonna think the same way about that either About a year ago. We'll see More yes, we a group of Businesses mostly Recognize who have been in the anaerobic digestion field for for many years Recognize the need for Biogas to be represented To get the voice out there because there are all are all these various benefits related and So in April of 2010 we formally incorporated the American Biogas Council Which is based here in Washington, DC and in addition to Advocating on behalf of anaerobic digestion of animal waste streams We also advocate on behalf of municipal and industrial waste streams and Processing them in anaerobic digestion one of the key benefits of anaerobic digestors is it is an energy tech of renewable energy? Technology, but it's also a sustainable waste management technology and When you're feeding in waste materials that have biogas potential biogas production potential on the back end you get the energy but you also get a process and stable or Further processed waste material that has yet another use so you're getting these outputs that have value and distinguishing between some of the Waste to energy technologies that you get energy, but you don't get the the other byproduct streams coming out So there really wasn't direct representation for anaerobic digestion technologies in DC or in state governments So we started with 23 founding members in April of last year and we just signed on our hundredth member this week So that's a lot, you know, that's significant growth over a short period of time in terms of legislative issues Probably our immediate focus was on some of the tax incentives. There was the 1603 Tax incentive that was due to expire at the end of last year and what that is very beneficial is You can take that or the tax credit. I'm sorry. You can take it in the form. I guess of a grant so that it it you can use it to cover capital costs of the project and through The extension of the tax credits last year this goes through the end of this year where it's due to expire again But it really helps get these projects going some they're not hugely huge capital projects But these are farms that don't have a lot of extra income These are some waste management companies that this is you know They're sort of fledgling when it comes to organics recycling and they can use these these funds the other legislative issue is the Refunding REAP and I'm not even going to try to Carol or it's the rural energy Assistance program which is part of the Farm Bill and the energy and water appropriations committee mark yesterday just Wiped out. Yeah, so this is down to about and this is a half million dollars. Yeah, and so this has been another critical tool for You know farm digest your development and so another thing that ABC is doing is is really trying to you know be up here Building education awareness about the potential for anaerobic digestion again as both a renewable energy technology and as a waste a Sustainable waste management Technology real quick as far as some of the biogas market issues in Europe They have Germany alone has four or five six thousand anaerobic digesters Farm and municipal and industrial in this country. We have about a hundred and seventy farm digester projects there's About fifteen hundred to two thousand and don't put me on that number but wastewater treatment plants with anaerobic digesters and Then you have a lot of industrial food processors putting in anaerobic digesters in there The closed loop is very exciting because they just capture the biogas that's produced. They put back into their boilers To to and then they don't have to use natural gas They can or if they're doing combined heat and power they can capture the heat and put that back in through the system So you're really seeing cost savings avoided cost and cost savings But then you can also produce renewable natural gas It's an upgraded biogas that can be fed into the natural gas pipelines And what we would love to see is more renewable portfolio standards in states recognizing Renewable natural gas as a way to meet utility You know their their goals their 20% or whatever goals and then This is happening more in Europe and it's been happening in the US for a while But upgrading the gas to fleet fuel or vehicle fuel and like a compressed natural gas and so the flexibility of the biogas Markets is also a real win for them real quick biogas produces 24-7. You've got to keep feeding that digester It's a biological system So it's not weather dependent wind or or sun and we believe in all those things Flexibility in biogas use the combined heat and power is a real advantage And if I have just another minute, I'd like one minute great So these things with wastewater treatment plant digesters is this is existing infrastructure in communities And many of these digesters were built with the capacity to process industrial higher strength organic industrial waste And a lot of those industries have moved away or closed down And so we have a round in terms of infrastructure in this country wastewater treatment plant anaerobic digesters with capacity And so we're starting to see more and more communities Taking in source separated food waste streams fats oils grease Which are very problematic in the waste the sewage collection and wastewater Systems you add them directly to the digester and not run them through the front of the plant And you get significant biogas increased biogas production without using a lot of the capacity same We're seeing on the farms adding food waste streams to farm digesters and you're getting more biogas production So we have some infrastructure that we really should be using it's one of those no-brainers It's not to say you don't have to upgrade a little bit to have that digester take that material But that's a kind of a no-brainer slam dunk and I'll stop W it's american biogas council.org is the website