China chicken farm turns fowl waste into green power

A Chinese chicken farm has found a way to generate green energy while dispensing with one of the more foul aspects of poultry production.

Minhe Animal Husbandry, in Shandong Province, claims to operate China's largest chicken waste-to-biogas energy plant. It has been in operation since July.

The 3MW grid-connected facility features an anaerobic digester system that consumes 300 tons of manure and 500 tons of waste water daily. The resulting biogas is then fed to three 1MW Jenbacher gas engines supplied by GE Energy, the US engineering giant which formally unveiled the innovative project yesterday.

Electricity produced by the biogas facility supplies the chicken farm with all its energy needs, while excess power is fed into the grid. The plant is expected to produce 16.8GWh of energy per year and reduce CO2 emissions by 67,000 tons annually. Residual material in the digester system can also be used as fertiliser.

Minhe is one of China's biggest chicken farms, providing 3.7 million chickens to the meat industry annually and maintaining an additional 1.5 million chickens in its breeding operations.

The biogas plant is a registered project under the UN's clean development mechanism (CDM) scheme. A document filed with CDM executive board lists The Netherlands’ Ministry of Housing and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development as project participants.

GE Energy said last year that it supplied two 1MW Jenbacher engines to a separate chicken farm in China's Yanqing County, located 50km north of Beijing, which is working on a similar biogas project.

The Beijing Deqingyuan Agricultural Technology farm owns three million chickens that produce 220 tons of manure a day. GE said its biogas plant is expected to generate 14.6GWh of electricity per year and will save an estimated 95,000 tons of CO2 from being released annually.

GE Energy did not provide an operational start date for the facility, which is expected to save the farm more than US$1.2m (£748,521) a year in electricity costs.

According to an environmental impact report on the Minhe project that was submitted to the World Bank, China's poultry breeding industry generates about 1.73 billion tons of waste annually, which is more than twice the 634 million tons of industrial solid waste produced each year.

The report noted that only a miniscule amount of excrement and sewage discharged by China's livestock and poultry farms is treated properly. It warned that improper treatment results in "serious pollution" to surface and ground water, in addition to having a "direct impact on the physical health and quality of life" of humans living near the farms.

According to GE Energy, biogas plants can significantly reduce the amount of dust created by the chicken waste, helping to improve regional air and water quality.