A biodiesel and rendering plant in southwest Minnesota believes it has found an answer to the problem.
Farmers Union Industries LLC and Home Farms Technologies USA Inc. inked a thermal energy contract on June 26. For at least the next 20 years, Farmers Union Industries will partially power its biodiesel and rendering plants with steam generated from a $35 million waste-to-energy power plant.
Steam will be produced by the gasification of garbage shipped by truck and rail from counties in southwest and south central Minnesota and also from the Twin Cities. The power station will also be designed to accept corn stover as feedstock fuel. Groundbreaking for the plant is planned for spring 2007.
Farmers Union Industries President Don Davis said the waste-to-energy plant would decrease natural gas use at the 3-million-gallon biodiesel plant by up to 60 percent.
"With all the unrest in the world, especially in the oil producing parts of the world, seeing cheap crude in the future is far-fetched," Davis said.
Davis said it only makes sense to use a renewable fuel source when producing a renewable fuel like biodiesel in an effort to replace fossil fuel dependency. The plant is burning animal fat in some of its boilers in order to cut energy costs. The Farmers Union Industries processing plant makes biodiesel from soybean oil and animal fat.
The idea of a waste-to-energy plant has been kicked around in southwest Minnesota for a couple of decades, first in Lyon County and most recently in Redwood County with a proposed plant near Lamberton. Those proposals never came to be. The difference now, Davis said, is that high and unpredictable natural gas prices have made a plant more feasible.
"It's going to be one of the first plants like this in the United States. There are few plants similar to this," Davis said.
The plant structure includes municipal solid waste material recovery facilities at the Twin Cities and Redwood Falls. Davis said communities that participate in providing solid waste to the plant would significantly reduce landfill waste and increasingly cumbersome expansion costs.
Davis also said waste haulers will pay reasonable tipping fees, which has always been a sticking point for such facilities.
