11/16/07 Bringing Gasifiers Home

Bringing Gasifiers Home. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Jack Zimmer is excited about being able to supply power. His power plant is not a massive city wide behemoth but a small gasifier project in Hayden, Idaho. Zimmer is the project director which brings a number of agencies together on this test project. ZIMMER: This is a straw to energy project. It was funded by an earmark from the United States Legislature, pushed through by Patty Murray. It's administered; though the earmark is to farm power, it's administered by the Department of Energy. We are working in cooperation with the USDA Agricultural Research Service at Corvalis, Oregon. Zimmer explains the basics of the project. ZIMMER: The project is to primarily take bluegrass straw which is as you are well aware in the State of Washington can't be burned anymore and using that as a source, a fuel source, a biomass fuel source for a gasifier type system. Gasification is a very efficient method of extracting energy from biomass materials. Zimmer explains why bluegrass was the fuel choice. ZIMMER: Because it's a byproduct and it has very little value as a byproduct. It's used for hay, primarily feeder hay when there's a market and that market is a very unpredictable market. That's our first step is to use Kentucky bluegrass straw and that's the way the grant was originally done, for an on-farm sized generator to produce electricity. As I mentioned in the beginning, this is not a massive energy plant. In fact the idea is to develop a unit that can easily be included on every farm. ZIMMER: When you are using biomass as your primary feedstock, the cost of moving biomass gets pretty big pretty quick so what you need to do is have these plants in close proximity to the biomass. This is as opposed for example where they're looking at switchgrass where they're planting switchgrass in the Midwest and they're moving switchgrass from 20  30 miles away. Then the economics start to fall apart pretty quickly. The small gasifier unit should be up and running shortly with more testing to be done. Zimmer says the units can easily become self-sustaining electrical power plants where additional power can be passed on. It's an interesting solution to power generation that we'll be watching closely in the coming months. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org