OSU gets grant to expand project to produce biogas

By OSU Extension

WOOSTER — Ohio State University’s Ohio Agri­cul­tural Research and Devel­op­ment Cen­ter (OARDC) has received a $6.5 mil­lion grant from the U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture and the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy to test and expand a university-developed tech­nol­ogy that can pro­duce bio­gas from a vari­ety of solid organic wastes and bioen­ergy crops.

Awarded through the Bio­mass Research Devel­op­ment Ini­tia­tive (BRDI), the three-year grant will also allow researchers to develop tech­nol­ogy for con­vert­ing bio­gas to liq­uid hydro­car­bon fuels, with the aim of fur­ther diver­si­fy­ing the country’s cur­rently avail­able suite of renew­able trans­porta­tion fuels.

Uni­ver­sity part­ners in the grant include Mis­sis­sippi State Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia. The project’s main indus­try part­ner is quasar energy group, a Cleveland-based com­pany that oper­ates sev­eral anaer­o­bic digesters (sys­tems that pro­duce bio­gas from organic waste) in Ohio and Mass­a­chu­setts, includ­ing one on OARDC’s Wooster cam­pus. Other indus­try part­ners include AgSTAR, Aloterra Energy, Amer­i­can Elec­tric Power, CNH and Marathon.

The project’s main goal is to enhance the inte­grated anaer­o­bic diges­tion sys­tem (iADs), a patent-pending tech­nol­ogy devel­oped by OARDC and oper­ated by quasar. The sys­tem com­bines quasar’s com­mer­cial liq­uid biodi­gester with a novel solid-state or “dry” biodi­gester. This com­bi­na­tion allows the over­all sys­tem to process types and amounts of dry bio­mass — such as yard waste, crop residue and lig­no­cel­lu­losic food waste — that the liq­uid biodi­gester can’t han­dle alone.

“The iADs can treat and recover energy from organic mate­ri­als with up to 85 per­cent solids con­tent,” said Yebo Li, the OARDC biosys­tems engi­neer who invented the inte­grated sys­tem and the grant’s prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tor. “By com­par­i­son, liq­uid biodi­gesters cur­rently used in the United States can only process up to 14 per­cent solids content.”

In the anaer­o­bic diges­tion world, this dif­fer­ence is very impor­tant. Bio­gas is pro­duced from the solid nutri­ents present in the biodi­ges­tion process, so the more solids that go in, the more bio­gas that comes out. Another advan­tage of this sys­tem is that it sig­nif­i­cantly increases the amount of bio­mass that can be fed to biodi­gesters and trans­formed into energy, allow­ing this bud­ding green indus­try to expand and cre­ate new jobs.

The first iADs was built in 2012 next to quasar’s biodi­gester in Zanesville, and can process 8,000 tons of waste annu­ally. Con­struc­tion of this sys­tem was sup­ported by a $2 mil­lion grant from the state of Ohio’s Third Fron­tier Advanced Energy Program.

“The BRDI fund­ing lever­ages our 2010 Third Fron­tier award, expand­ing the public-private part­ner­ship between The Ohio State Uni­ver­sity and quasar,” said quasar pres­i­dent Mel Kurtz. “Work related to this grant will be per­formed at our energy cam­pus in Zanesville — quasar’s largest facil­ity and prov­ing ground for iADs development.”

The new grant will allow Li and col­lab­o­ra­tors to research pro­duc­tion of bio­gas from three feed­stocks: yard waste, corn stover and giant mis­cant­hus (Mis­cant­hus x gigan­teus). Giant mis­cant­hus is a peren­nial warm-season grass from Asia that is gar­ner­ing atten­tion across the Mid­west as a poten­tial bioen­ergy crop. Researchers at OSU South Cen­ters at Pike­ton have been test­ing the crop’s adapt­abil­ity to Ohio since 2010.

Project col­lab­o­ra­tors Rat­tan Lal, an Ohio State soil sci­ence expert, and Denny Hall, assis­tant direc­tor of the university’s Ohio Bio­Prod­ucts Inno­va­tion Cen­ter, will eval­u­ate the nutrient-rich “diges­tate” left over from the anaer­o­bic diges­tion process as a fer­til­izer to grow giant mis­cant­hus on strip-mined land not suit­able for tra­di­tional crops.

Addi­tion­ally, Scott Shearer, chair of Ohio State’s Depart­ment of Food, Agri­cul­tural and Bio­log­i­cal Engi­neer­ing, will study bio­gas feed­stock logis­tics, includ­ing the use of a methane-fueled truck to both trans­port the diges­tate to the field and bring the mis­cant­hus bio­mass back to the biodigester.

The idea, Li said, is to “close an eco­log­i­cal loop,” reduc­ing trans­porta­tion costs while improv­ing soil fer­til­ity and crop yield. To that extent, Bhavik Bak­shi, a researcher in Ohio State’s Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal and Bio­mol­e­c­u­lar Engi­neer­ing, will con­duct a life-cycle analy­sis to deter­mine the eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal impact of the dry biodi­gester technology.

While bio­gas can be burned to pro­duce elec­tric­ity or com­pressed to use as vehi­cle fuel, the project will also seek to expand its use in trans­porta­tion by devel­op­ing a tech­nol­ogy to con­vert bio­gas to liq­uid hydro­car­bon fuels — so that it can be used just like gaso­line. Sci­en­tists will use tech­niques such as cat­alytic reform­ing and Fischer-Tropsch syn­the­sis to achieve that goal.

Another aim of the project is to develop a tech­nol­ogy for pre­treat­ment of lig­no­cel­lu­losic bio­mass. Pre­treat­ment, Li said, can enhance the “digestibil­ity” of this bio­mass in the dry biodi­gester, lead­ing to higher bio­gas pro­duc­tion. Another project col­lab­o­ra­tor, Zhong­tang Yu of Ohio State’s Depart­ment of Ani­mal Sci­ences, will study the micro­bial com­mu­nity present dur­ing the anaer­o­bic diges­tion of pre­treated feedstocks.

Posted by Tina Murdock on Dec 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.