SwissFarmerPower’s slurry-to-biogas plant in startup mode

Luzern, Switzerland-based SwissFarmerPower Inwll is helping to make local farmers in a five-to-six kilometer (3.1 to 3.7 mile) radius around its business happy in a stinky, but environmentally friendly way. The farmers now have a place to dump their excess pig and cow manure.

SwissFarmerPower’s Managing Director Christoph Eggerschwiler told the Cleantech Group today that the company is closing on its first year of production at its plant that takes everything from household organic waste and animal manure and turns it into a variety of eco-friendly resources, including biogas. He considers the plant to be in startup mode.

See Eggerschwiler in front of the plant »

The zero waste plant has the capacity to accommodate 45,000 tons of liquid slurry and 16,000 tons of solids per year, with about 80 to 90 percent of it coming from pigs and 10 percent from cattle, Eggerschwiler said.

The plant has the ability to generate 20 million kilowatt hours of natural gas, 11,000 tons of compost, 10,000 tons of liquid fertilizer, and 30,000 cubic meters of clean wastewater annually that can be used by the agriculture industry and beyond, he said.

The biogas is being sold to stations in the area, with 98 percent methane and 2 percent carbon dioxide/nitrogen content. The wastewater is produced via a filtration and reverse osmosis process, Eggerschwiler said.

See a photo of the wastewater treatment room »

“We can save a lot of mileage,” said Eggerschwiler, explaining that farmers were previously having to deposit their excess manure outside of the region because they didn’t have enough use for it on their land.

The transportation costs were about CHF 30 (US$29) for every ton that had to be transported 100 kilometers (62 miles). Today, it costs the farmers much less, and they can drop it off close to home.

See a local truck making a drop off, being weighed at the SwissFarmerPower plant »

However, until energy prices are high enough, there isn’t a market for the fertilizer and compost. It has to be sent out of the Zurich area, to vegetable farmers, for example, Eggerschwiler said. He added that the manure is treated so it ends up being high in nitrogen content and better for plants than before it arrived, without any ammonia.

The CHF 20 million ($19.6 million) plant was initially funded by about 60 local farmers and Finaco, a Switzerland cooperative that owns companies in the ag sector. The plant is expected to have a 20-year payback, Eggerschwiler said.

“You won’t get rich with this plant,” he said. “But the hope is that it will break even.”

It is owned by an industrial arm of the Luzern government (51 percent), the farmers (36 percent), and Finaco (13 percent). Local farmers that have shares in the plant get a discount for the manure they drop off, at CHF 6 per cubic meter.

“For every share, they can bring us a certain amount of biological waste,” Eggerschwiler said.

The smallest shareholder, with three shares, brings the plant 50 cubic meters a year, while the largest shareholder, at 400 shares, drops off 6,000 cubic meters annually. Non-shareholders pay CHF 10 per cubic meter of manure.

As a reference point, Eggerschwiler said one cow produces about 25 cubic meters of waste per year, while a pig releases 15 cubic meters annually.

The plant’s technology, which includes three weeks of processing the waste in an anaerobic digester, was designed by Conzepte Technik Umwelt or CTU, a spinoff from the Swiss company Sulzer.

Anaerobic digestion breaks down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen to produce biogas rich in carbon dioxide and methane. The solids left over can be used for fertilizer.

CTU specializes in thermal waste treatment and energy production from biomass. It designs and supplies plants or subsystems as a general contractor, specializing in energy from biomass, such as biomass fermentation, and energy from waste including fermentation plants for biowastes.

The technology isn’t new, however. Last month, agriculture company and meat producer Ruchlaw Produce secured more than £500,000 ($800,000) from the Scottish government to develop technology, using anaerobic digestion, which would power one of its farms using pig waste (see Pig slurry, vegetable waste put to new purposes in Scotland).

The farming waste pumped into the digester would create methane and carbon dioxide that would be pumped into a biogas plant to produce electricity and hot water for heating. It’s expected to produce 832 megawatts of electricity and 629 megawatt hours of heat.

And last year, a €3.5 million ($4.8 million) biogas plant opened in Kavala, the second largest city in northern Greece, built by Kavala, Greece-based Kreka to produce biogas and organic fertilizer using an integrated animal waste management system (see Greece’s first biogas plant opens).

Cleantech developments making news in the past 24 hours

• Metabolix, ADM to open new bioplastics factory
• Rockwool nears construction on Indian insulation factory
• Two Israeli wastewater firms to locate in Michigan
• Al Gore: Super grid is critical to combating the climate crisis
• A quest for CO2 and O2 optimal management with biofuel from algae

View the last week of cleantech developments here | Subscribe to full feed