Next in biofuels: Poultry power

By Scott Harper
The Virginian-Pilot

BLACKSBURG

Poultry poop is a serious ecological problem in Virginia. So is the burning of fossil fuels.

So it's not surprising that environmentalists and farmers are so enthused by a Virginia Tech scientist who is developing technology to turn poultry waste into a safer fertilizer and a biofuel that resembles maple syrup.

Staked with more than $1 million in grants, associate professor Foster A. Agblevor, a native of Ghana in west Africa, expects to test his mobile poop reactor this fall at a chicken farm in the Shenandoah Valley, the heartland of Virginia's poultry industry.

The $830 million-a-year industry, the state's wealthiest agribusiness, has been searching for an environmentally friendly solution to its mountains of chicken and turkey wastes for years.

The manure is laden with nutrients, mostly ammonia, nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as the potential for carrying pathogens and disease. The wastes, known as litter, are linked to water pollution and algae blooms as far away as the Chesapeake Bay and to fears of an avian flu outbreak.

Agblevor says his alternative-energy innovation would do away with such biosecurity concerns in the valley and could go a long way toward neutralizing poultry's damaging impact on state waters.

Foster A. Agblevor, an associate professor of biological systems at Virginia Tech, has been researching the conversion of poultry wastes into fertilizer and biofuel.delores johnson photos | the virginian-pilot

Furthermore, he says, farmers could benefit from a new type of residual biofuel - cleaner and cheaper than heating oil or propane - to warm their poultry houses and farm buildings.

"I wanted a permanent solution," Agblevor said recently at his campus office in Blacksburg. "The science is there, for sure. It's whether we can build the technology on a bigger scale and get the same results. That's the question."

The hunt for viable alternative energy is fast becoming a major focus in research laboratories across Virginia and the rest of the country.

Rising costs of conventional fossil fuels, combined with their ties to global warming and national security, are providing scientists such as Agblevor with money, political interest and opportunities that for years were simply not there.

Last year Virginia created its own research coalition, of which Virginia Tech is a member. The group, based at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, sorts through and prioritizes environmental proposals. Wind power and biofuel development topped the agenda this year.

For his project, Agblevor is receiving financial aid and backing from the federal government, the Virginia Poultry Federation, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and other interest groups.

The technology is "of national interest and importance," said Kristen Hughes, an agricultural engineer for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in Virginia, an environmental group. "There's a lot of people in a lot of farm states watching this very closely."

A chemical engineer by training, Agblevor attended college in Canada and once worked for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. He seems nonplussed by all the recent attention and pressure.

Quiet and polite, Agblevor has worked closely with local chicken farmers to solve an age-old environmental problem in the Shenandoah Valley.

"They've been quite nice, very accommodating," he said.

At meetings, the farmers simply call him "the professor."

The syrupy fuel oil is collected at a Tech laboratory and will be used during a pilot project this fall as an alternative heating oil at a poultry farm near Harrisonburg.

A power plant in Minnesota today burns turkey waste to create electricity. Another litter-to-energy project is under way in Georgia, the biggest poultry state in the country.

Companies including Perdue Farms, meanwhile, are experimenting with systems that convert litter into fertilizer. A similar venture was tried a few years ago in Harrisonburg, Virginia's poultry capital, but it went bust.

Agblevor said his innovation is different from those in two key ways: His creates a biofuel; the others do not. They have air emissions to worry about; his does not.

The secret, he said, is how he burns the poop - through a process called fast pyrolysis, or the quick heating of material in the absence of oxygen.

A prototype unit, about the size of a small refrigerator, for months has been churning out gray, ashen charcoal fertilizer and buckets of biofuel in a basement lab at Virginia Tech.

Agblevor calls the dark-brown, sticky fluid "pyro-oil" or "pyro-diesel." The fertilizer, he says, is lower in nutrients and less environmentally risky to apply on farms and fields.

One of his graduate students, Ryan Tarrant, manages the poultry unit and charts its progress daily. He's writing his master's thesis about the experiment.

Tarrant said he was drawn to the project out of a personal interest in environmental protection and a professional leaning toward biological engineering and clean technology.

"We have the perfect storm here," he said. "There's environmental degradation all around. We're in an energy crisis, and there's a farm problem with all this litter. I was grabbed right away by the chance to help solve all of these."

On a recent rainy day, Tarrant was using a knife to scrape the last blobs of oil from a metal rod he had just unscrewed from the unit's base.

He explained that the oil, which smells like cigar ashes, attaches to the rod after being suddenly cooled in another chamber of the unit.

Tarrant collected the syrup in a jar, labeled it, and smiled.

A functioning model of Agblevor’s waste-to-energy reactor has shown promise in lab tests with small amounts of poultry wastes.

"Pretty wild, eh?" he said. "This could be the future, right here."

The real reactor is being built in Colorado. It should be about 9 feet high and 2 feet wide. It will be towed to Virginia, probably this fall, on the back of a tractor trailer and put to work at a farm in Dayton, outside Harrisonburg.

The farm is owned by Orem Heathwole, who raises hens and sells their eggs.

"I'm excited to be involved," Heathwole said. "Right now, litter is almost a liability. It'd be great to see it become an asset."

He has built a small shop and a heating system to use the biofuel and plans to stoke the reactor with litter from a neighboring farm as well as his own.

Agblevor said he expects to process between 1 and 5 tons of litter a day, netting about 800 pounds of charcoal fertilizer and 1,000 pounds of biofuel.

Agblevor said the field trial should last about a year. If successful, he hopes investors will purchase the technology and start building more units so they dot the landscape.

He envisions a day when farmers could haul their litter to a local unit in the morning and pick up their fertilizer and biofuel later that day.

"That may be a long way off," he said, watching the rain fall outside his office. " But, you know, it's not that far-fetched."

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com