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World`s largest biomass plant running on chicken manure online in the Netherlands

Yesterday, Gerda Verburg, Dutch Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Food Quality, opened the world`s largest biomass power plant running exclusively on chicken manure. The €150 million project is owned and operated by multi-utility company Delta, cooperative DET, ZLTO and Austrian Energy & Environment A.G. (a consortium including Siemens Nederland N.V.) The facility will deliver renewable electricity to 90,000 households. The biomass power plant solves a key environmental problem in the Netherlands: managing the vast excess stream of chicken manure, which, until today, had to be processed at a high cost. The biomass power plant will utilize approximately 440,000 tons of chicken manure, roughly one third of the total amount produced each year in the Netherlands. Many European countries, including the Netherlands, suffer under an excess of different types of animal manure that pollute the environment. Costly methods are used to avoid it being spread out over land, to process it or to avoid creating the excess in the first place. Using the manure as a carbon-neutral energy source has become the most efficient, environmentally-friendly, and cost-effective of all management options.
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Areva Acquires Leading Biomass Company in Brazil

AREVA (Paris:CEI) announces today the acquisition of a 70% stake in Koblitz, a Brazilian provider of integrated solutions for power generation and co-generation (heat-generated power) from renewable sources. Its founder Luiz Otavio Koblitz and the main managers of the company will maintain a 30% stake in Koblitz.
Founded in 1975 in Recife, Koblitz has a total workforce of more than 500 people with branches in Sao Paulo and Sao José do Rio Preto, the largest sugarcane growing areas of the country. The company's core business is the supply of turnkey services for the construction of biomass and small hydro-electric power plants. Since 1996, Koblitz has participated in 76 biomass projects, including 58 using sugarcane bagasse*, totalling more than 2.000 MW of references.
This acquisition is in line with AREVA's business development strategy on the CO2-free energy market. It strengthens the group's position in Brazil, where renewable energies already provide 90% of electricity and where the use of sugarcane bagasse should increase by 50% in the next five years. Brazil's renewable energy market offers a large potential with a required capacity growing by at least 5% (5.000 MW) per year to avoid electricity shortages.


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Snowflake Biomass Plant to the Grid

Renegy Achieves Significant Milestone With Synchronization of Its Snowflake Biomass Plant to the Grid

Renegy, based in Tempe, Arizona, is a renewable energy company focused on acquiring, developing and operating a growing portfolio of biomass power generation facilities. Renegy seeks to rapidly grow its renewable energy assets with the goal of becoming the leading independent power producer (IPP) of biomass electricity in North America utilizing wood waste as a primary fuel source. Renegy's current biomass power generating assets include a 24 MW facility near Snowflake, Arizona, that is scheduled to begin commercial operations this quarter, and an idle 13 MW biomass plant in Susanville, California, that has the potential to be restarted by the end of 2008. Renegy also recently signed Letters of Intent for the acquisition of two additional biomass facilities -- an operating 20 MW facility in Loyalton, California, and an idle 18 MW facility in Ione, California. Renegy's other business activities include an established fuel aggregation and wood products division, which collects and transports forest thinnings and woody waste biomass fuel to its power plants, and which sells logs, lumber, shaved wood products and other high value wood by-products to reduce the cost of fuel for its primary business operations. Find Renegy on the Worldwide Web at http://www.renegy.com.


Geographical distribution of biomass and potential sites of rubber wood fired power plants in Southern Thailand

Biomass residues from rubber trees in rubber producing countries have immense potential for power production. This paper presents the case of the south peninsular of Thailand, where the rubber industry is intense. Mathematical models were developed to determine the maximum affordable fuel cost and optimum capacity of the power plant for a given location of known area-based fuel availability density. GIS data of rubber growing was used to locate the appropriate sites and sizes of the power plants. Along 700 km of the highway network in the region, it was found that 8 power plants are financially feasible. The total capacity is 186.5 MWe. The fuel procurement area is in the range of less than 35 km.


Megafauna biomass tradeoff as a driver of Quaternary and future extinctions

Earth's most recent major extinction episode, the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction, claimed two-thirds of mammal genera and one-half of species that weighed >44 kg between ≈50,000 and 3,000 years ago. Estimates of megafauna biomass (including humans as a megafauna species) for before, during, and after the extinction episode suggest that growth of human biomass largely matched the loss of non-human megafauna biomass until ≈12,000 years ago. Then, total megafauna biomass crashed, because many non-human megafauna species suddenly disappeared, whereas human biomass continued to rise. After the crash, the global ecosystem gradually recovered into a new state where megafauna biomass was concentrated around one species, humans, instead of being distributed across many species. Precrash biomass levels were finally reached just before the Industrial Revolution began, then skyrocketed above the precrash baseline as humans augmented the energy available to the global ecosystem by mining fossil fuels. Implications include (i) an increase in human biomass (with attendant hunting and other impacts) intersected with climate change to cause the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction and an ecological threshold event, after which humans became dominant in the global ecosystem; (ii) with continued growth of human biomass and today's unprecedented global warming, only extraordinary and stepped-up conservation efforts will prevent a new round of extinctions in most body-size and taxonomic spectra; and (iii) a near-future biomass crash that will unfavorably impact humans and their domesticates and other species is unavoidable unless alternative energy sources are developed to replace dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.

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