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Nebraska Meat Plant to Burn Gas from Beef Waste |
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| US: December 12, 2007 | ||
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NEW YORK - A JBS Swift & Co. meat packing plant in Nebraska will turn beef waste into a biogas it will burn to cut dependency on fossil fuels while reducing its garbage stream, the company said on Tuesday.
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The Grand Island, Nebraska plant, owned by Brazil's JBS S.A., has agreed to let Environmental Power Corp's subsidiary Microgy, Inc. build and operate equipment to create biogas from waste. When the anaerobic digesters and other equipment begin production in the fourth quarter of next year, it will make biogas at an annual rate equivalent to about 1.7 million gallons of heating oil. It will replace about 25 percent of the plant's natural gas consumption, the companies said. Microgy will sell the gas to JBS Swift, the US unit of JBS, in a 15-year contract. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. "The meat processing industry represents an important market for our co-digestion systems to produce renewable biogas," Rich Kessel, president and CEO of Environmental Power, said in a release. The companies said the deal will allow the plant to avoid taking some of the waste to landfills, where it would release odors and methane, a greenhouse gas about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by David Gregorio)
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REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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