Benson, Minn. – The gray, sandy mix of turkey droppings and other bits and pieces flowing through Greg Langmo’s fingers back onto the floor of his barn isn’t just funky dirt. It’s fuel.
With 16,000 hens gobbling around him, Langmo is standing on a 15-inch layer of turkey litter – about 750 tons of the stuff – that represents a new source of energy.
It will help fuel a $200 million power plant due to begin full-scale production next month. The 55-megawatt Fibrominn LLC plant will be the first poultry-litter-fired power plant in the United States, tapping a novel source of renewable energy to produce enough power for 50,000 homes. Its developers are planning similar plants in other major poultry states.
Poultry litter – a combination of droppings, wood chips, seed hulls, feathers and spilled feed – has long been spread on fields as a fertilizer. That’s cheap and effective, but it can cause nitrates and phosphates to build up in soil, groundwater and runoff. So poultry producers across the country have been looking for another way to get rid of it.
The poultry industry’s problem created an opportunity for Fibrowatt Ltd., which developed three smaller poultry-litter power stations in Britain in the 1990s. As it happens, Minnesota is the nation’s largest turkey-producing state.
When the state’s producers learned about Fibrowatt, farmers and local officials began an intensive courtship of the company. At the same time, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy Inc. was looking for new sources of renewable energy to comply with a mandate imposed by the Minnesota Legislature that requires it to get 110 megawatts of power from biomass annually.
Poultry litter works as a fuel because it’s relatively dry, so it’s easy to burn compared with cow and hog manure, which is too wet and smells far worse.
Three tons of poultry litter has about as much energy as a ton of coal. The ash can be sold as a phosphate-rich fertilizer.
And because it’s biomass, it doesn’t contribute to climate change like fossil fuels do. While both release carbon dioxide when they’re burned, the biomass originated in plant material that absorbed carbon dioxide as it grew. Burning fossil fuels, like oil and coal, release carbon dioxide that had long been trapped in the earth.
