THE PEELLAND BIOBASED ECONOMY PARK: CLOSING THE LOOP LOCALLY

Deurne is located in the heart of the Brabant Peel, once a vast bog area in the southern Netherlands and Belgium. The Brabant Peel has a long history of supplying what might be called biofuels and green materials in an old-fashioned sense. Peat mining on a commercial scale began there in the late 19th century. The dried black peat was used as a fuel, while the upper layer of grey peat was used as a substitute for straw in stables and as a foundation for roads built on soft soil. However, peat extraction for fuel ceased long before the Second World War, and the last factory for the extraction of peat for use in potting composts closed its doors more than 30 years ago. Now the Peelland region’s long tradition as a supplier of biofuels and green materials will be continued in a Biobased Economy Park (BBE Park) currently being developed by Energy Port Peelland (EPP). EPP is a cooperative that aims to make the Deurne region energy-neutral and independent from fossil fuel. Co-op members are supplied with green energy - which is still largely purchased from sources elsewhere - and the profits are used for projects to make the region self-supporting for energy. The Sun at School project is one example. This educational project involves 18 primary schools in the region which have been equipped with solar panels, and which use solar power as a starting point to make children aware of energy and climate issues.

New business

The Biobased Economy (BBE) Park - initiated a few years ago by members of the Deurne Industrial Circle - is another EPP project. “At some point we asked ourselves why we are not processing the residues from our own region ourselves instead of transporting and processing them elsewhere?” explains Iwan Gijsbers, director of ROBA, a consulting firm cum laboratory, and one of Industrial Circle members supporting the project. For example, the waste management company Attero is already composting the organic waste from households in the Deurne region at a local plant, while the foliage from local greenhouse horticulture is transported over hundreds of kilometres to a specialised composting facility. And although roadside cuttings are often used for co-fermenting with manure at one of the local biogas plants, the resulting digestate has to be transported over quite long distances to be used as fertilizer. “We realised that we could use these residues locally as a source of renewable energy and bio-based raw materials thus adding value to waste instead of spending money to get rid of it,” Gijsbers says. “This approach fits in well with EPP’s objective to become an energy neutral region. As well as greening the economy, it will also provide new opportunities for innovation and new business development.” To further develop the idea, EPP in Deurne approached SRE, the City Region of Eindhoven, a public organization that - among other things - works at connecting projects and parties in the area of energy efficiency and renewable energy. “We have been approached by other initiatives

Waste, including organic waste from households, foliage waste from horticulture, and animal manures are sometimes transported over hundreds of miles for processing, and these different types of waste are often processed separately at different locations. Entrepreneurs in the town of Deurne in the South East of the

Netherlands have a better idea. They plan to process all residual biomass from the region into raw materials and green energy by combining several waste processing techniques on a single site.

Door Joost van Kasteren

that aim to promote the local collection and use waste of residues - not least thanks to developing technology - but what makes the Deurne project so promising is the cooperation being shown by the local biomass supply chain in Deurne - a real prerequisite for the success of this sort of initiative,” says Jan Westra, consultant for Biobased New Energy at SRE. “Another plus is that the energy cooperative is aiming to provide multiple benefits. These include economic benefits for the local people, as well as environmental benefits achieved via the greening of supply chains and production of bio-based raw materials, and social benefits gained by working together for the community.”“By processing residues locally you have less distances to cover. That means less fuel consumption and therefore fewer CO2 emissions,” notes Gijsbers. “But the solution is not completely straightforward to implement. For local processing initiatives to work, the suppliers must commit themselves for a few years to supply us with their residues rather than seeking a higher bidder each year. Energy Port Peelland is trying to bring all parties together so that everyone will benefit. That is quite a challenge.”

Proven technology

The Eindhoven-based consultancy company, Ingenia, has recently examined the technical and economical feasibility of BBE Park Deurne. “Our analysis shows that enough bio-residues are released annually in the region to benefit from the economies of scale of processing technologies,” says Thijs Adriaans, consultant at Ingenia Eindhoven and

author of the feasibility study. The study shows that transforming these residues into green energy and bio-based products is also economically feasible. The BBE Park in Deurne will initially produce relatively simple products such as animal bedding, compost, dry fertilizer pellets and briquettes. “The plan is to start with techniques that have proven themselves on a scale of 100,000 tons,” says Adriaans, “but technological development is very rapid. In the longer term the BBE Park can consider moving on to produce more sophisticated products such as building materials and bio-plastics. The idea is for the Deurne BBE Park to become a breeding ground for the bio-based economy in the region - a dynamic entity - that focuses on innovation, experimentation with new techniques and new products, and that attracts new markets.” Initially three technologies will be combined at the BBE Park: fermentation, drum screen separation and ‘organic’ drying. Fermentation will be used to convert organic waste, grass clippings and horticulture foliage into biogas, which can then be cleaned and processed further to produce green gas with the same properties as natural gas. “You can inject the green gas into the regional gas network, but it’s probably more interesting from an economic point of view to compress it,” says Gijsbers. “The energy content of compressed natural gas (CNG) is similar to diesel, but CNG is much cleaner. Because the regulations for exhaust fumes are getting stricter, there is a lot of interest in this clean alternative fuel for road transport and inland shipping.”There are other advantages too. Raw biogas is a mixture of methane and CO2. By upgrading biogas to natural gas or CNG, clean CO2 is produced that can be used as a

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Iwan Gijsbers: “By processing residues locally you have less distances to cover. That means less fuel consumption and therefore fewer CO2 emissions.”

fertilizer in greenhouses, making plants grow better and faster. “That is proven technology,” says Adriaans. “There are already many digesters that provide pure CO2 to greenhouse growers in the region.”

Livestock litter

The digestate remaining after the fermentation of organic waste consists of almost 80% water, and will be composted. The high temperatures reached - up to 70 – 80 C - during the composting process will not only release much of the water as water vapour, but will also kill pathogens to produce a dry and germ-free residue. This can then be separated into fine and coarser fractions using a rotating drum screen. The fine fraction can be used to replace sawdust, straw or sand as bedding for cows, pigs and horses. The coarse fraction can be pressed into pellets or briquettes, which then will be sold locally as a bio-fuel which can be used, for example, to heat stables and sties or to provide heating for small and medium-sized enterprises in the region. “The use of biomass as a replacement of natural gas will quickly become profitable in boilers that have to run for many hours,” explains Gijsbers. Meanwhile the heat released during the composting process can be used for the ‘organic drying’. ‘Organic’ because the necessary heat will be produced thanks to the tireless efforts of millions of microorganisms, rather than from the burning of fossil fuels. At the BBE Park in Deurne the organic drying process will be used to dry the non-organic fraction of household waste used as fuel in a

waste-fed power plant. The use of drier waste as fuel will enhance the combustion efficiency in the power plant, and thus increase the amount of electrical energy that can be produced from a given amount of waste.

Fertilizer granules The heat that is released during composting will also be used to turn pig and cattle manure into dry fertilizer granules that can be easily exported over long distances. The production of fertilizer pellets will also help to solve the problem of disposing of surplus manure in the region. However, the manure will not be fermented at the BBE Park. “Although fermentation of manure is a standard practice, and is quite efficient, especially if you combine it with plant material or organic waste from households, it will not be used to treat manure at the BBE Park,” says Adriaans. “This is because fermentation does not help to solve the problem of surplus manure. After fermentation you are still left with almost 90 percent of the input. When you add organic waste from households into the mix, you end up with even more digestate from fermenting. Because farmers have to pay 25 – 30 euro’s per ton to dispose of digestate, co-fermentation of manure and organic waste, while technically attractive, is not a very economical solution.” The manure brought to the BBE Park will be already pre-processed by specialized companies to separate it into liquid and solid fractions. The liquid fraction is rich in nitrate and can be used as fertilizer in fields and

Ready compost as a bedding material

Green waste that biogas can be made of

Microbiological degradation generates heat

Thijs Adriaans (left) en Iwan Gijsbers. Wood chips can serve as a bedding material or as a biofuel

meadows in the region. The semi-solid fraction has a dry matter content of 30%, and contains most of the phosphate in the manure. At the BBE Park it will be dried further using the heat generated from composting. Because Dutch regulations impose a legal limit on the amount of phosphate that can be disposed of in the Netherlands, a large part of the dry manure will be transported as dried granules to areas in France and Germany where there is a shortage of manure and farmers are willing to pay for it. “Selling manure to farmers in these regions becomes profitable if we are able to reduce the volume and weight of manure enough to significantly reduce transport costs over long distances,” says Gijsbers.

Omnivore installations

If all goes according to plan within two years 100,000 tonnes of residue will be flowing into the BBE Park in Deurne to be converted into products like compressed natural gas (CNG), clean CO2-fertilizer, litter for stables and sties, compost, briquettes and fuel for the waste-fed power plant. According to Adriaans and Gijsbers the Park will be ready to handle it. The technology is nearly ready to go. Adriaans: “Since the three main processes - fermentation, separation and drying - are all proven technologies, the main challenge that remains is in the fine tuning. For example, we want to process fully some waste streams, such as the organic waste from households in the region, but that means we will not have the capacity to process all the manure that is produced in the region. The challenge lies in optimizing the combination of processes technically and economically.” It is important to use the equipment capable of processing a variety of waste streams. “Most of the year we will ferment a regular stream of organic household waste, but sometime in November all the growers in the area will want to discard their plants, thereby creating large amounts of foliage, that will have to be fermented,” Adriaans explains. “Therefore we are looking to create omnivore installations that can respond flexibly and with a minimal loss of efficiency to a varying range of waste streams.”

Savings

Adriaans and Gijsbers are also confident that the project is not only economically feasible, but will also provide a huge incentive for further sustainable development in the region. Adriaans’ calculations indicate that the direct saving of (fossil) natural gas is equivalent to eight million cubic metres per year, which corresponds to a reduction in CO2 emissions by at least 14,500 metric tons. The reduction in transport mileage will lead to a saving of 4.5 million litres of diesel each year, equivalent to a reduction of 8,500 tons of CO2 emissions. In addition the BBE Park will also produce useful products for sale, including, litter for livestock bedding and dry fertilizer pellets. Future products will include chipboard for the construction industry and building blocks for the production of bio-plastics. Chemicals, such as natural pesticides from the waste foliage of tomato and pepper plants are among the other products planned; reason enough to involve the chemical industry at an early stage in the development of the park. “All the elements for a successful project are in place at a site available that meets all requirements, including the requirements to obtain an environmental permit,” says Iwan Gijsbers. “Now we need potential partners eager and willing to invest part of the estimated twenty million euro to enable us to realise the first stage of the BBE Park. This level of private investment will encourage banks and other financial institutions to also participate. If all goes as I hope it will, we should be able to start building some time during the next year.”

The Biobased Economy Park in Deurne is one of five business cases that

are being developed as part of the framework of the Interreg IVb project

BioenNW, ‘Delivering Bio-Energy to North West Europe’. Five regions (Paris,

Birmingham, Liege, Aachen and Eindhoven) are cooperating in the

promotion of innovative technologies to process and add value to biomass

residues. Each of the five regions has a Bio-Energy Support Centre. The

Eindhoven Regional Partnership (SRE) serves as the Bio-Energy Support

Centre in the Netherlands. The business case for the Biobased Energy Park

Deurne was developed in cooperation with the HAS University of Applied

Sciences in ‘s-Hertogenbosch and the Eindhoven University of Technology.