An Answer to Waste Worries?

Nor is it assured that Allen Family Foods will get regulatory approval. The Maryland Department of the Environment plans to question Allen Family Foods about odors and emissions. Allen said it won't start construction until it gets an operating permit from the department.

At least a few residents in Dorchester County have vowed to fight the project. "If it's never been done in the United States, why should we be the guinea pigs?" resident Jim Dolan said.

The idea of burning chicken manure goes back to at least 1983, when the Delmarva Power company experimented with the fuel at a power plant in Delaware, Delmarva Power spokesman Matt Likovich said. The utility later studied retrofitting another plant, in Maryland, estimating it would cost $50 million. Neither project got off the ground.

Burning chicken manure isn't easy. Unlike lumps of coal, manure is an inconsistent fuel because of where it comes from.

Birds grow up inside large chicken houses. In Delmarva, the houses typically are slightly longer than football fields and hold about 25,000 birds that live atop beds of sawdust or wood shavings. The bedding can get wet from roof or pipe leaks, among other things.

When the birds are hauled off to slaughterhouses, workers drive tractors into the houses to clean them out. During full cleans, the bedding is generally nine parts manure and one part wood product, and is called "chicken litter."

The litter's varying moisture content can become a problem when burning.

Under many burner designs, chicken litter is fed into the furnace on conveyor grates. The drier sections tend to burn first while wetter sections can pass through uncombusted.

There have been other attempts to burn chicken waste in Maryland. In 1999, a quasi-government group called Maryland Environmental Service fed cubed chicken litter into a furnace burner that produced electricity and thermal power for a state prison complex in Somerset County. But as the manure burned inside the combustor, the resulting ash gummed up air-supply holes. "It was a difficult fuel to work with," said James Allen, operations manager of the complex's power plant.

In light of such failures, Delmarva poultry giant Perdue Farms passed on burning several years ago. Its solution: Spend $12 million to build a plant to dry chicken litter, convert it into pellets and sell it as fertilizer. The company had hoped it would consume about 80,000 tons of chicken litter a year this way. The product is well-liked by golf course managers and farmers. But it's not as rich in nutrients as other commercial fertilizer. Over the next year, Perdue expects to use about 65,000 tons of chicken litter in making the fertilizer. The company said it might burn in the future.

Others say burning is the way to go.

For years, the company Fibrowatt, which is building the Minnesota turkey excrement unit, has eyed Maryland's chicken manure. Several years ago, Fibrowatt asked Maryland officials for tax credits to help it build a litter-to-energy plant. That effort drew concern at Perdue Farms, where officials argued that such measures could unfairly favor one company and questioned whether there would be enough manure to supply all the proposed projects. Countered Carl Strickler, chief operating officer of Fibrowatt: "There's definitely enough for everybody."