Biofuel in Action Around the World

The United States produces almost 5,000,000,000 kilograms of fat from chickens, cows and pigs each year, so it is not surprising that enterprising scientists would look for ways to use this 'waste' product.

Gas Technology Institute (GTI) DES PLAINES, Ill., has successfully demonstrated that chicken litter can be gasified to produce hydrogen and generate electricity using a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC).

Over 100,000 automobiles have made the switch to Methane recently in Italy, including about one third of the taxis in Milan. Gasoline stations there are now selling "Metano" (Methane gas). Converted vehicles carry heavy tanks in which commercially produced Methane is stored under pressure.

In 2003, the other side of the world, New Zealand was gearing up to use thousands of tons of animal fats (tallow), which is the by-product of the country's meat industry. It has an output of 150,000 tons of tallow currently exported for use in animal foods or chemicals manufacture. The New Zealand contingent stated that to process this waste is doubly energy-efficient when compared to producing biodiesel from specially grown crops. It was envisaged that use of the biodiesel would be to drive diggers and other machinery on a hydro-electric scheme, giving them the distinction to be the first country in the world with sheep-fat powered bulldozers.

Two poultry companies Allen Family Foods and British-owned Fibrowatt are planning to build power plants fueled by chicken litter in Maryland's Dorchester County. The approach was conceived in part because of new state and federal regulations that tighten restrictions on the use of chicken litter as fertilizer. Poultry waste has been blamed for polluting Chesapeake Bay tributaries and causing fish kills. Chicken giant Perdue Inc. has found another way to use the waste so it doesn't end up on Eastern Shore farm fields.

The company is building a $12 million plant on the outskirts of Blades, DE to turn chicken litter into fertilizer pellets for Midwestern farms. The multibillion-dollar poultry business is one of the largest on the Delmarva Peninsula, which has more than 6,000 chicken houses, each one holding about 25,000 birds. The chickens create as much as 800,000 tons of litter a year, much of which is spread on farm fields as fertilizer.

The Dorchester County Chamber of Commerce has endorsed plans for a 40 megawatt power plant that would burn 300,000 tons of poultry litter purchased from local farmers and 100,000 tons of forest waste a year producing enough electricity to power all of the county's homes. The plant would be operated by Fibroshore, the U.S. subsidiary of Fibrowatt, which runs three chicken waste power plants in the United Kingdom.

In the United States, several federal agencies have been promoting power generation from burning LFG (Land Fill Gas) but now Inch'on City in South Korea is home to the largest garbage-fueled power plant in the world.

The municipality of Sâo Paulo has combined cooling and power from incineration of biomass and the city of Seoul, South Korea, another major metropolitan area elsewhere around the globe, just began to receive power to more than 180,000 households from what currently is the world's largest garbage-fueled power plant. The 50-megawatt plant runs only on bio-methane, i.e., the gas that is collected as garbage or other animal waste decomposes. A private firm, Eco Energy, invested 77 billion won (83 million U.S. dollars) in building the power plant.

In return, the company received commercial rights to the electricity generated by the plant that began operating 12 December. The plant sits on a mammoth garbage dump in the coastal city of Incheon, which is located west of Seoul. The private company retains those commercial rights for 11 years before they hand over operations to a South Korean department for waste management.

In 2002, ASDA supermarket chain in Britain was unwittingly at the centre of a cooking-oil scam. The company's innocent involvement in a moonshine operation at Llanelli, South Wales, led to a special 'frying squad' to be set up by Dyfed Powys police, who discovered that hundreds of fuel-tax dodging drivers were running their cars on "extra value" cooking oil mixed with methanol.

Ironically, as a knock-on effect ASDA decided to try running its own fleet of trucks on waste from kitchen frying pans that the company produces- more than 50,000,000 litres of used cooking oil and 138,000 litres of waste frying fat every year from its canteens, restaurants and rotisseries. And, having been approached earlier by a biofuels refiner, they decided to go into the biofuels business for themselves. A 'spin-off' was the boost to the legal use of recycled cooking oil by vehicles on Britain's roads and from January 2003, trucks were to carry slogans saying "This vehicle is powered by chicken fat"!

According to a report published by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), not only is the livestock sector a major contributor of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions-18%- as measured in CO₂ equivalent, but it also is a major source of land and water degradation. Most of the air and water pollution comes from manure.

When emissions from land use (such as production of feed crops and grazing land) and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9% of CO₂ derived from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65% of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO₂.