A DVO anaerobic digester, scheduled to open at Calgren Renewable Fuels on Sept. 30 in Pixley, Calif., will convert animal waste into energy, reducing the environmental impact from farm waste greenhouse gas emissions by more than 90 percent, says Steve Dvorak, owner and founder of DVO.
This is DVO’s first installation in California, and the state’s only next-generation anaerobic digester.
The DVO anaerobic digester, built by Andgar, is designed to hold about 1,400,000 gallons of manure and organic waste. Each day, the waste-to-energy digester will receive 55,000 gallons of solid and liquid waste from Four J Farm Dairy, a nearby dairy farm with approximately 2,000 head of cattle.
Biogas, a byproduct of the anaerobic digestion process, will replace thousands of gallons of natural gas currently being used by the Calgren on-site cogeneration facility to produce 55 million gallons of ethanol each year.
Biosolids, another byproduct, will be sent back to Four J Farm Dairy to be used as a high-quality and low pathogen count cattle bedding. Liquid nutrients from the digestion process will also be used by the farm to fertilize growing crops.
A hog-manure-to-energy project is under construction in Northern Missouri, developed and constructed by Roeslein Alternative Energy (RAE) in collaboration with Murphy-Brown of Missouri (MBM) the livestock production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods.
