The potential of biomass waste: organic humus and electricity

A report in today's St Petersburg Times describes how a Florida company, Mother's Organics Humus Farm, is planning to turn yard waste into organic humus to sell to local farmers. The company's founders are renewable energy enthusiasts who believe the nation's current energy crisis is here to stay - unlike the 1970s.

They are surely onto something - perhaps one of the least well understood and developed concepts in the emerging field of renewable energy: the enormous potential of biomass waste.

If you click on the biomass category on the left hand side of this screen you will more information about other projects in this field, including a number of waste-to-energy endeavors, seeking to turn biomass into electricity. Biomass Gas & Electric Co., an Atlanta-based alternative energy producer, is partnering with Progress Energy Florida to build one of the state's first, and possibly the largest, power plant that will convert wood waste into electricity.

Early on when we started this blog we featured Dr Jose Sifontes, a biomass to energy pioneer in Gainesville who turns the city's municipal waste into a clean-burning gas. He and others are exploring ways of capturing landfill gases to drive turbines to produce electricity. Florida horse manure is another source of potential energy. Dr Ann Wilkie at the University of Florida is one of the leading researchers in the field of anaerobic digestion for waste treatment. Her current program focuses on biogas generation from bioethanol and biodiesel by-products. As she likes to say; "Fossil fuel is fossil thinking."

 NASA is also funding research at the Florida Solar Energy Center (FSEC) in Cocoa to make hydrogen gas for the space shuttle from local landfill gas.

Click here to read today's story in the St Pete Times.

Click here to visit our biomass page.

- David Adams

Comments

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u stanky!