Agribusiness  March 26, 2009

Cow power coming to former nuclear facility

PLATTEVILLE – Xcel Energy’s biggest electrical generation facility in Colorado will increase its electrical output by about 125,000 megawatt-hours – enough to power 17,000 homes annually – through a process that turns cow manure into natural gas.

Xcel signed a 10-year agreement earlier this month with New York-based Environmental Power Corp. (Nasdaq: EPG) to build an anaerobic digester near Fort St. Vrain in southwest Weld County. The $30 million facility, which will convert dairy cow manure into a gas that can be burned to generate electricity, will be built, owned and maintained by Microgy, a wholly owned subsidiary of Environmental Power.

The partnership agreement will help Xcel meet a state mandate to produce 20 percent of its power through renewable resources by 2020.

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“This effort further gives us the opportunity to meet both our renewable energy and emission reduction targets in Colorado,´ said Tim Taylor, president and CEO of Public Service Co. of Colorado, an Xcel company. “Microgy’s solution also gives us the added benefit of conserving traditional fossil fuels at one of our largest power plants.”

Xcel spokesman Mark Stutz said it’s hoped the Microgy-built digester will help produce 1 percent to 2 percent of the natural gas that Fort St. Vrain burns annually as it produces electricity for a large part of Northern Colorado.

The addition of an anaerobic digester to Fort St. Vrain is another chapter in a colorful history of the facility located about three miles west of Platteville. The facility opened in 1979 and operated for 10 years as a nuclear-powered plant. It was shut down in 1989 and decommissioned as a nuclear facility. In 1996, it was partially repowered as a natural gas-burning facility and has been fully operational since 2001, Stutz said.

Weld County focus

A national leader in anaerobic digestion technology, Microgy was acquired by EPC in 2001. Relatively new to the United States, anaerobic digestion has been extensively used in Europe, and Microgy holds an exclusive North American license for a proprietary Danish digestion technology.

Michael Hvisdos, Microgy’s executive vice president, said the anaerobic digester will produce biogas from the methane extracted from manure processed from a local dairy.

“We’ll be producing biogas and we clean that up to pipeline standards and inject it into the pipeline system,” he said. Hvisdos said he could not yet reveal the dairy’s location because discussions are ongoing but said “there’s a high probability that it will be in Weld County.”

“It’ll be in or around Weld County – that’s as specific as we can get right now,” he said, adding that the system “works best when the (manure) is close.”

Hvisdos said the facility will need manure from a dairy or dairies with 10,000 to 20,000 cows for maximum production. While manure from other animals can be used, he said dairy cows are preferred because each can produce 120 to 150 pounds of raw material daily.

Hvisdos said one of the best features of anaerobic digestion is that it can produce energy from virtually any organic waste. “It’s really a very flexible product,” he said.

The facility will also use food waste and grease from restaurants in the Denver area and along the Front Range. Hvisdos said diverting the waste to the digester is good for the environment.

“People dispose of these things in various ways and typically a lot of it ends up in landfills,” he said. “This saves on that, so that’s a big plus.”

EPC’s and Microgy’s flagship facility is in Stephenville, Texas, where the Huckabay Ridge Project has been producing renewable natural gas for Pacific Gas and Electric in California since January 2008.

Waste competition?

EPC is building an anaerobic digester for JBS-Swift’s meatpacking plant in Grand Island, Neb., to help power that facility on slaughter waste. Hvisdos said EPC may seek to use waste from the JBS plant in Greeley and a Leprino cheese production facility to be built in Greeley by 2011.

Although he said no discussions have been held with those potential waste suppliers, Hvisdos said tapping into those waste streams “is certainly a possibility.”

But there’s already a customer lined up to take waste off the producers’ hands: The city of Greeley. The city is planning to use animal and cheese waste for its Clean Energy Park planned for the Western Sugar Tax Increment Financing District east of downtown where Leprino plans to build its factory. An anaerobic digester is envisioned to provide power for the future Clean Energy Park.

Bruce Biggi, Greeley’s economic development manager, said he already has letters of intent from JBS and Leprino to take waste from those facilities. Biggi said he recently talked to Hvisdos and didn’t believe the Fort St. Vrain project would likely use waste from Greeley, which is about 20 miles away. “He certainly didn’t suggest he’d need those waste stream supplies,” Biggi said. “Our geographical proximity would lend our project better access.”

The Clean Energy Park project is still in the study stage and no date is set to begin its construction. Biggi said he believes there’s room to collaborate on anaerobic digestion rather than compete.

“We’ve received a lot of interest from a lot of players that are interested in it,” he said. “Microgy could end up being the technology provider for us.”

PLATTEVILLE – Xcel Energy’s biggest electrical generation facility in Colorado will increase its electrical output by about 125,000 megawatt-hours – enough to power 17,000 homes annually – through a process that turns cow manure into natural gas.

Xcel signed a 10-year agreement earlier this month with New York-based Environmental Power Corp. (Nasdaq: EPG) to build an anaerobic digester near Fort St. Vrain in southwest Weld County. The $30 million facility, which will convert dairy cow manure into a gas that can be burned to generate electricity, will be built, owned and maintained by Microgy, a wholly owned subsidiary of Environmental Power.

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