An Answer to Waste Worries?
Disposal by Burning Proposed in Md. For Chicken Farms

By Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 23, 2006

Why burn chicken manure? For starters, consider how effectively chickens produce it.

On the Delmarva Peninsula -- a chicken-growing mecca that includes Delaware and the Eastern Shores of Maryland and Virginia -- 571 million birds create enough manure annually to fill a line of backyard swimming pools stretching from Washington to Philadelphia.

But disposal options are limited. The leading method, spreading on farms, works well as a fertilizer until too much is applied. Then chemicals can seep into streams and end up in the Chesapeake Bay. A newer option turns manure into dried, little pellets of fertilizer that can be transported out of state and sold to farmers and golf courses. But that product has drawn fewer buyers than hoped.

Which brings us to chicken producer Allen Family Foods Inc. The company last week presented plans to the Dorchester County Council to burn chicken manure in Linkwood on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The resulting steam would help run an Allen Family Foods factory that processes leftover chicken parts such as heads, feet and feathers, turning them into ingredients for animal feed.

Allen Family Foods said it has sorted through the technical barriers that sunk its previous manure-burning plans. The proposed furnace would burn about 1 1/2 tractor-trailer loads of manure a day.

That would be only about 2 percent of Delmarva's annual manure load. But backers see the project as one potential answer to the chicken industry's huge waste disposal needs because if burning proves safe, the technology could expand and consume more manure.

In Britain, three giant poultry-manure burners are producing electricity. In Minnesota, a facility using technology similar to the British plants is going up that is designed to burn 100 tractor-trailer loads of turkey waste a day.

In Maryland, some leading conservationists back the project. If more manure is burned, they say, less will end up on farms and potentially in runoff.

"Conceptually, we think it's a great idea," said Beth McGee, a senior water quality scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "There's a lot of reasons to like these projects."

Development is one of those reasons. If it sounds as though the Eastern Shore is overrun with manure, it isn't. The smells aren't everywhere and can be fleeting. Subdivisions are popping up and taking up farmland, Allen Family Foods said. And state planners predict that the Eastern Shore's population will begin to increase at a faster rate than many of Maryland's counties closer to Washington and Baltimore.

"If we don't find alternative uses [for manure], it's going to be hard to keep growing chickens," Mike Pilcher, Allen Family Foods vice president of operations, said of an industry valued at $1.7 billion in the Delmarva Peninsula.

Chicken executives have been talking up manure burning for more than two decades. But it is technologically challenging, and no one has made it work commercially in the United States, according to industry executives and engineers.

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."

Allen Family Foods has gone down the manure-furnace path before. Several years ago, it partnered with an engineering firm in Michigan to build one in Hurlock in Dorchester County. But that project ran aground after technical design and cost problems.

The proposed unit under review isn't as complicated. It is designed to overcome the difficulties of burning higher-moisture litter by directing hot air at it.

Neither Allen Family Foods nor the engineers would disclose costs. But such a burner package would generally cost more than $1 million, experts say.

When Allen Family Foods presented its plans in Dorchester County last week, they received a skeptical but somewhat welcome reception. County resident Glen Payne told the council that he was worried about odors and emissions. He said he'd been to Britain and scoped out a facility. "People in that plant wore masks," he said.

But Dave Mooney, one of the Georgia engineers hired by Allen Family Foods, said his design mimics elements employed in Britain for odor control. The manure would be stored in a room with negative air pressure. Inside it would stink. Outside, it wouldn't, he said.

Council President Glenn L. Bramble, a lifelong county resident, called the venture a good idea as long as it met environmental requirements.

He didn't anticipate a significant increase in truck traffic. And he said the common practice of spreading chicken manure on farms hasn't always been ideal.

"I know it's part of the process," he told the Allen Family Foods executives. "But when they spread that on the field, for about two or three days, it's bad. It's no question about that. But I live with that; I don't complain. But, I mean, I have to put the windows up."