isramart: Turning Human Organic Waste Into Energy

Isramart news:

By John Lorinc
San Jose

With an eye firmly trained on a job-rich clean-tech future, San Jose city officials unveiled this week a $20 million deal under which three private partners will produce 900,000 gallons of biogas using German technology and 150,000 metric tons of organic waste generated by San Jose residents.

The project, which still needs regulatory approvals, will be built on a 40-acre site near a fallow landfill. It is the first North American biogas venture to use biosolids (that is, human waste) from a waste treatment operation.

Most municipalities send sludge to landfills, but San Jose’s director of corporate outreach, Nanci Klein, told Green Inc. the city was looking to bolster its waste diversion, cut emissions, phase out its dependence on imported energy and create clean-tech jobs.

“This step puts us ahead of other jurisdictions,” she said.

The city estimates that the project will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 1,800 vehicles a year. The project is a partnership between GreenWaste Recovery, Zanker Road Resource Management and Harvest Power Inc., a clean-tech firm with backing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the clean-tech venture capital fund.

The firms will earn revenue by selling the biogas and fertilizer generated by the plant.

Harvest has licensed a “dry fermentation” process developed by Bekon Energy Technology, a German firm that has built a dozen such facilities in Europe and expects to open another 13 this year.

The biomass is fed into a concrete, air-tight digester and fermented. The byproducts are biogas and fertilizer pellets. The gas can be used to power the plant or transformed into compressed natural gas and sold to fleets. Bekon’s process is merely the latest example of how process engineering companies have found ways to extract biofuels from biomass.

As I reported here Wednesday, some firms are transforming chicken manure into bio-oil. And EnerTech recently signed a deal in Rialto, Calif., to reprocess municipal sludge into carbon pellets that can be burned to operate cement kilns.

According to Ms. Klein, San Jose will derive as yet undisclosed leasing revenue from the deal. The San Jose-Santa Clara Water Pollution Control plant, which consumes 12 megawatts of electricity a day, may become a large customer. City officials say the plant, which is currently powered by landfill methane, as well as gas from an onsite digester and energy from Pacific Gas & Electric, could eventually save as much as 25 percent in energy costs by purchasing biogas from the new facility.