[Gasification] Dairy manure converted to renewable diesel via gasification.

Wed Jan 25 01:07:10 CST 2017

Thank you Art!

From: Gasification [mailto:gasification-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On
Behalf Of Art Krenzel
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2017 9:11 PM
To: gasification at lists.bioenergylists.org
Subject: [Gasification] Dairy manure converted to renewable diesel via
gasification.

I found this article in a magazine I read.  It appears the answer to manure
disposal has been demonstrated complete with the final products of diesel
fuel and char.

There are no cost figures offered in this article so I suspect it is a
pretty basic research experiment rather than a production project.

Art Krenzel

California dairy turns manure into renewable diesel

<http://www.agwastesolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/SteveBrucewax-30
0x296.jpg> 

An 1,100-cow dairy in southern California became the first-ever operation in
the world known to produce no-sulfur renewable diesel products from manure
on a livestock facility in late April.

The milestone is the culmination of three years of collaboration between
Scott Brothers Dairy in San Jacinto, California, and Ag Waste Solutions
(AWS), a privately held company that designed the farm's manure processing
system.

"To make it to the top of the hill is a euphoric moment," dairyman Bruce
Scott says.

Steve McCorkle, founder and CEO of AWS, announced the partnership's
achievement on Facebook on April 27, 2015. The company claims its technology
is the "future of sustainable farming."

"We have proven that we can complete the circle of energy for individual
farms while creating profit centers from manure, enabling farmers to exceed
regulatory requirements and truly control their own destiny," McCorkle said
in a statement.

Scott says he is most proud to have produced a "deliverable" for the
California Energy Commission, which helped fund the project. As far as he
understands, the commission has no other no-sulfur diesel projects dealing
with this type of waste stream, so he is pleased to have "crossed the finish
line" by submitting a final report. The next step for the system is to prove
it can operate continuously and thus be a commercially viable option for
other agricultural operations.

"I didn't expect to win over favor on this project quickly. But I've firmly
believed in the direction of this project," Scott says. "The tunnel may have
gotten longer, but the light at the end of it has always stayed visible in
my mind. I still believe it's the most viable technology to get rid of a
waste stream and produce something that's value-added at the same time."

Processing manure into renewable diesel products is just one of the system's
manure processing capabilities.

The dairy's multi-stage system first separates high-BTU manure solids from
the dairy's liquid manure effluent. McCorkle says the first stage removes 98
percent of the total suspended solids and 40 percent of the dissolved
solids, making good irrigation water for most farms.

The extracted water is further purified at Scott Brothers Dairy to remove
the other 2 percent of suspended solids and the remaining dissolved solids,
making the water potable. (This step was to satisfy manure application
requirements that were specific to the dairy's regional regulatory agency.
See this Progressive Dairyman Feb. 7, 2014
<http://www.progressivedairy.com/features/producers/11775-dairy-prepares-to-
turn-manure-into-renewable-diesel> article for more background about dairy's
unique permitting situation.)

The dairy's manure solids are then fed to a pyrolysis gasifier. The gas
production module then thermochemically decomposes the manure solids in the
absence of air to produce syngas. The gas is then scrubbed of impurities and
compressed for storage.

Using a Fischer-Tropsch process, the hydrogen and carbon in the gas is then
converted in the system's final stage into no-sulfur renewable diesel
products. The Fischer-Tropsch process had been used to convert other
feedstocks to renewable diesel but until recently was never proven to work
with manure, let alone on a farm.

Perhaps more importantly than producing diesel, the process also produces a
refined wax product in a controllable diesel-to-wax ratio. McCorkle says the
wax product's market value is three times that of the renewable diesel and
can be further processed or blended off-site with other petroleum products,
such as jet fuel or kerosene.

"We exceeded our own expectations on the first pass," McCorkle says. "We
were able to control the types and factions of liquids and waxes created.
And we were able to attain the optimal ratio of liquids and waxes. This
satisfies our business model of making enough diesel fuel for farm use and
selling the wax products off-farm to create additional profit centers from
manure."

The system on Scott Brothers Dairy that produces renewable diesel products
was built at pilot-project scale, meaning it is not commercially sized nor
automated enough in order to operate 24-7 with minimal manpower.

If the dairy had an adequately sized liquid fuels production module that ran
continuously, it could produce at least 1 gallon of diesel fuel from three
cows' manure for a day. Right now the system can convert only one-eighth of
the dairy's gasified manure per day and has not yet been automated to run
continuously.

The first production run of renewable diesel products was evaluated in an
on-site lab as well as sent to an external lab for validation. Future
production runs will be tested to validate the fuel is consistently
comparable, or superior, to other diesel fuels. Initial tests have shown the
fuel has very similar characteristics to pump diesel but without detectable
levels of sulfur. Even ultra low-sulfur pump diesel contains up to 15 ppm of
sulfur.

When asked if it passed the sniff test and whether he would put it in his
own tractor, Scott says: "No question about it."

McCorkle suggests the next steps toward a commercially viable, 24-7 system
require more funding to upsize the liquid fuels production module in order
to match the size of the rest of the system and to demonstrate that the
system can run continuously and more automatically with predictable results
and with minimal personnel.

McCorkle is optimistic both goals can be achieved. For now, his countenance
glows over the petrochemical milestone he and the dairy have achieved almost
entirely by themselves.

"We didn't achieve these results in a large, complex refinery with tens of
engineers, chemists and scientists. We achieved these results with only a
handful of people working in a remote farm environment," McCorkle says.

Article Credit -
<http://www.progressivedairy.com/features/producers/13532-california-dairy-t
urns-manure-into-renewable-diesel> Progressive Dairy
(www.progressivedairy.com)

The work was done by Stephen McCorkle, Agricultural Waste Solutions, Inc,
Westlake Village, CA 91261

Their telephone number is 805-551-0116

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