TREPA learns about digesters

The high light of the TREPA AGM was the talk by Eric Barr of Southwest Eco Energy, a hereditary  mink rancher who is part of a consortium trying to make a difference.

He and his partners started Southwest Eco Energy to take care of bio-waste from mink farms and other sources. Basically, they built a “digester” that takes any organic matter and coverts it to methane gas which fuels a generator to produce power for the NSP grid. A side product is organic liquid fertilizer. There is also side waste of plastic and other non digestible material that, for now, still end up in the land fills.

Digesters in Germany provide over 30 percent of the electricity use of the county. Additional digesters in Nova Scotia could replace the need for generation by coal and resolve most of our need for disposal of organic material.

We also learned that our governmental agencies are ill prepared to dealing with advanced technologies such as this. It is hard to get decisions made because staff workers don’t know how to interpret regulations that may or may not apply and are afraid to make decisions.

He recounted one meeting with three agencies represented. Each was willing to approve a change if one of the others would say okay. None, however, would say okay.

He also said that NSP is not all that cooperative in approving or helping with input of power to their system. In one instance a digester could not be built because NSP would not provide transmission lines because of a conflict with local wind generation goals in which they had an interest.

We came away with the impression that the technology that is being used by Southwest Eco Energy is potentially a win-win approach. It takes any organic material (mink waste, deer carcasses, food from supermarkets, yard material, etc.) and changes it into methane for energy production and liquid fertilizer. There is additional technology to turn the plastics and other non-organic material into glass. Thus, all of our “waste” gets recycled into useful product.

Thanks to Eric for a most enlightening talk.

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