Maryland to Get Irish Chickenshit Burner

Irish company wins MD contract to turn chicken litter into energy

Sixteen years ago, Jack O’Connor’s government warned him that new regulations were coming to limit the amount of nitrogen he could spread on his farmland.

O’Connor, who lives in Ireland, didn’t fight the regulations. Instead, he used them as the basis for a business plan to turn manure into energy. Today, his company, BHSL, which he founded eight years ago, has built and is operating three manure-to-energy systems in Europe. The company recently won a contract for close to $1 million from the Maryland Department of Agriculture to build a demonstration of their system on a farm on the Eastern Shore. Many more farmers on the Delmarva Peninsula are interested in the technology. Environmental advocates, too, are watching it closely.

. . .the O’Connor brothers turned to a process called fluidized bed technology. The bed is essentially a furnace in which poultry litter is burned. Poultry litter is a mix of manure and sawdust that serves as the bedding in a poultry house. Jets of compressed air break up litter, allowing for better combustion of the nitrogen-rich waste. The extracted energy replaces fossil fuels to heat the chicken houses, saving the farmer thousands of dollars a year.

The byproduct is a phosphorus-rich ash. For every 10 tons of manure that goes into the system, one ton of ash comes out. That ash is a “viable product,” Declan O’Connor said, with several different uses. It can be pelletized and added to fertilizer. Virginia Tech researchers have completed a two-year study indicating the ash can be a fertilizer for tomatoes.

One advantage of the system, advocates say, is that it’s an on-farm technology, as opposed to a power plant that pools manure from various sources. Like the dairy digesters, it provides farmers with a money-saving product — fuel — and a salable byproduct — phosphorus-rich ash, while also reducing their carbon footprint and the additional pollution they would add if they land-applied manure.

This is just a trial run to see if the system is feasible here.  Hopefully it will be, but lets think of the ramifications. It's turns chicken farmers into energy plant managers as well, and I doubt these will be problem free turn-key operations.  It will also make chicken farmer manufactures of a more or less refined fertilizer product, which they will have to sell. Currently, they almost give away manure to farmer as a means of disposal. This change will mean more revenue for the chicken farmer, and added fertilizer costs for the farmers.