Making manure do more

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

What a waste.

All that smelly odour and the gases from the Valley’s agricultural manure could be doing more.

“It’s a pile of energy,” says energy consultant Jim Retallack.

His Acadia Management Group is doing a feasibility project on a potential anaerobic digestor in the Berwick area, with support from the Town of Berwick, the federal Green Municipal Fund and the provincial Department of Energy.

The most recent step in the process is a call out to Kings County dairy, poultry, hog and egg producers, looking for their operations’ waste.

“These are raw materials that are relatively well understood - and they can be commercialized.”

An anaerobic digestor would hold the waste in an air-tight tank, turning it for 20 days, and capture and burn the resulting methane gas to make electricity.

“It doesn’t smell - it’s all closed, as it’s trucked to the site and as it’s processed,”Retallack says. “You want the odouriferous gases.”

Retallack visited five operating anaerobic digestors in the United States in late fall, and says the practice has been common since the 1970s, and even longer and at a larger scale in Europe. There are none operating on a commercial scale in Nova Scotia.

This feasibility project has identified three needs: a builder, and AMG is prepared to take that on with investment funding; a buyer of the electricity, and Berwick’s Electric Commission is in discussions for a potential power purchase agreement; and a biosource - the manure and barn waste from Kings farms.

“If we captured 50 per cent of that waste - and it could go beyond, into other areas of Nova Scotia - we would satisfy one-third of Berwick Electric’s energy demand,” Retallack says, adding the proposed facility could generate 1.2 megawatts continuously and 1.8 MW at peak. “It’s green energy, it’s a secure supply, it gives Berwick green credits to use - and we could sell the rest.”

In addition, farmers could take the processed waste back in better condition for traditional applications - field spreading, fertilizer and even - like they do in the States - use the dry, odourless powder for animal bedding.

“We’re wasting so much of it, and it just turns your head around,” Retallack says.

Response from farmers in just the first couple of weeks of contact has been slow but steady.

“They want to know more. I need baseline information - how many animals do they have? How much waste? Then I can go back and start seeing how that data fits in the feasibility study.”

Retallack envisions the anaerobic digestor up and running by the end of the year, ideally. With a solid feasibility study and funding - perhaps farmers themselves would see it as a co-operative venture with a triple payback: getting rid of waste, getting a better nutrient product on the other side and an income from the sale of power - it could happen that fast.

In the meantime, Retallack is also working with the non-profit venture, the Berwick Agriculture-Energy Centre (Berwick, Berwick Electric, AMG, the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, the Kings County Federation of Agriculture and the County of Kings), on a research study looking at the potential energy value in digesting non-traditional wastes, such as the slurry from agricultural processors like Larsens.

In a presentation to Berwick town council April 8, he said if Berwick itself is looking at major upgrades or changes to its own wastewater treatment facility, it would be worth the town’s while to consider the work in conjunction with a digestor facility, There is the potential for exploiting common handling of materials, particularly water.

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