Dutch Biomass Plant to Use Chicken Manure to Power 90,000 Homes
by Kimberley D. Mok, Montreal, Canada 
on 09. 8.08
Image: Paul de Lhama on flickr
In the latest development of large-scale biomass energy production, the Netherlands is now home to the world’s largest biomass power plant running only on – yep, you got it – chicken manure. Though biomass energy schemes are hardly anything new, (see these "power to the people" projects in California, China, India and Uganda) it’s a matter of scale and the plant’s dual objective to provide an alternative source of energy, while tackling a serious problem: namely, the high environmental impact of an excess stream of chicken droppings.
As Dutch agriculture minister Gerda Verburg announced during the plant’s opening last week, the plant will convert one third of the country’s total 1.2 million tons of poultry waste produced per year, or 440,000 tons.
Located in Moerdijk, Zeeland and running at a capacity of 36.5 megawatts, the plant will generate more than 270 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year enough to power approximately 90,000 households.
The Dutch multi-utility company Delta, which constructed and operates the 150 million euro plant, is calling it a carbon-neutral effort as it will preclude the emission of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane from chicken waste, which is usually laid out as fertilizer over vast tracts of farmland.
Previously, over 800,000 tons of Dutch poultry poop had to be processed abroad at a high cost. Now, the remaining ashes of the manure will be sold as a fertilizer rich in phosphorus and kalium.
Furthermore, the Dutch cooperative "Duurzame Energieproductie Pluimveehouderij (DEP)" (Sustainable Energy Production in the Poultry Sector) gives its 629 poultry farming members a eco-friendly and profitable waste management option by allowing them to provide chicken waste to the power plant.
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Energy Plant to Use Poultry Biomass for Fuel
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We could certainly use this here in the South East US. You can't drive five minutes in any direction without seeing a row of chicken houses.
If those warehouses are dark enough, maybe they could encourage bat roosting. That's a higher energy guano!
This is great, however, it would probably be better (and likely cheaper) to have a more decentralized approach where the individual farms would have their own anaerobic digestors and gas turbines in a combined heat and power setup. This would reduce waste transportation and cost and fuel consumption, and plus it would have the added efficiency of CHP, which this project doesn't sound like it has.
We need to think about long-term strategy here. I'm all for capturing the gases, but burning the stuff seems excessive, when this should really be returning to the land, so that another generation of chicken feed can be produced. I doubt that the ashes are as effective a fertilizer as compost would be.
It's frustrating that we'd be using chicken manure for this. I'd like to see all that chicken manure composted and returned to the soil. Artificial fertilization is destructive to the environment both in terms of mining and its effect on the soil. Also, it would be good to work out these processes now as we reached peak phosphate two decades ago, and it's running out. The only substitute for artificial NPK fertilizer is stuff like composted chicken manure (which is actually one of the best ones).
@ john m
Please remember that the methane coming from chicken droppings associated with commercial chicken farms is many times more harmful than the CO2 associated with burning it.
Dan A makes a good point about localizing this to individual plants. Because our plants are already pretty large it would seem that each plant could benefit on a smaller scale from their own biomass, and it would ultimately be more efficient.