Pig slurry, vegetable waste put to new purposes in Scotland

Agriculture company and meat producer Ruchlaw Produce has secured more than £500,000 ($800,000) from the Scottish government to develop technology that would power one of its farms using pig waste.

The company, located in Dunbar, East Lothian, on the southeast coast of Scotland, is looking to create a £1.5 million anaerobic digester, which would be the first for the area, although it’s not new technology.

The facility, located at its Ruchlaw Mains Farm near Stenton, would use pig slurry and vegetable waste to power the site, with excess renewable energy being sold to the national grid and excess waste from the digester to be used as fertilizer in farming.

The funding came from the government’s rural development program, with an application now underway to move forward with the project. It’s not clear where the remaining funds would come from for the project.

The 137-hectare (339 acres) farm houses 3,200 breeding sows, which produce about 70,000 pigs annually.

The farming waste pumped into the digester would create methane and carbon dioxide that would be pumped into a biogas plant to produce electricity and hot water for heating. It’s expected to produce 832 megawatts of electricity and 629 megawatt hours of heat.

The company is hoping about 2,000 tons of vegetable waste would be collected by a local authority and vegetable producers, preventing it from being sent to landfills.

It’s a concept already being pursued by companies such as San Francisco-based utility Pacific Gas & Electric, which receives methane from a dairy farm in Fresno, Calif. Renewable energy produced from the cow pies also powers the dairy’s onsite operations (see Holy cow! A pie-powered dairy farm?).

E3 BioFuels of Nebraska also fueled its ethanol plant largely by biogas from animal waste instead of coal or natural gas (see Cow powered ethanol plant enters production) before declaring bankruptcy in late 2007 after a boiler explosion.

Cleantech developments making news in the past 24 hours

• Metabolix, ADM to open new bioplastics factory
• Rockwool nears construction on Indian insulation factory
• Two Israeli wastewater firms to locate in Michigan

View the last week of cleantech developments here | Subscribe to full feed