Nebraska beef plant signs on for waste-to-energy

Portsmouth, NH— Environmental Power Corporation announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Microgy, Inc. has entered into a Letter of Intent (Agreement) with Swift & Company, the world’s second-largest processor of fresh beef and pork products.

The Agreement provides that Microgy and Swift & Company intend to construct a biogas production facility at Swift’s Grand Island, Nebraska beef processing plant that will utilize Microgy’s anaerobic digestion technology to extract methane-rich biogas from animal wastes, meat processing wastes and certain wastewater plant residual streams that would otherwise be landfilled or land applied. In addition to the initial biogas project in Grand Island, both parties will cooperate to identify, evaluate and develop projects at Swift’s seven other beef and pork production facilities throughout North America.

Swift and Microgy intend to complete the negotiations for a long-term biogas purchase and supply commitment for the Grand Island processing plant as well as a long-term lease for the location of the biogas production facility to be owned and operated by Microgy. With respect to each additional project that the parties agree to develop, Microgy will provide all necessary designs and engineering to construct the biogas production facilities, and will own, operate and maintain the facilities.

Randy Hull, president of Microgy, said, “We believe that there is the potential to recover energy values in excess of about 1,200,000 MMBTU’s per year from multiple digesters within Swift’s network of eight beef and pork processing plants and that this demonstrates the capability of anaerobic technology to generate significant amounts of energy from waste materials. That’s equivalent to over 25,000 gallons per day of heating oil, and, as a result, projects like this have the potential to greatly reduce our dependence on imported hydrocarbons, whether they be oil or liquefied natural gas.”