What do you get when you mix half-eaten cheeseburgers, cooking oil, cow manure, yard waste and cornstalks?
Electricity.
Put all that stuff in an anaerobic digester such as the one being built on the South Side by quasar qnergy qroup of Cleveland, and it produces methane gas to run generators that send electricity to homes and businesses.
"You don't have to waste the waste anymore," said Chris Korleski, director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
Working with researchers at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, quasar is pioneering methane-producing technologies to turn waste into energy.
"It's the future," Gov. Ted Strickland said May 3 at the ground-breaking for the Columbus digester plant, which will convert about 40,000 tons of the city's waste into 1 megawatt of electricity annually.
Mel R. Kurtz, quasar president, foresees a day when Ohio is dotted with bio-digesters, used by municipalities and farmers to turn waste into revenue-producing electricity.
"We create jobs, we create revenues and we create a cleaner environment," Kurtz said.
Ohio, he estimated, could use about 6,500 digesters that would cost a total of $15billion to build, creating about 186,000 construction jobs. The investment would be recouped in about six years, Kurtz said, because that many digesters would generate about $2.5billion annually in energy revenue while destroying 2.8million tons of air-polluting methane a year. But with digesters costing about $2million each, municipalities and many farmers might have trouble affording the devices without government help.
"If the technology can be commercialized and used in production to preserve energy and reduce waste, that's rewarding, but everything has to be economical," said Yebo Li, an Ohio State University bio-systems engineer consulting with quasar at the Wooster facility.
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dgearino@dispatch.com
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