By: Deborah Johnson Wood
The success of the biodigester at the Den Dulk Dairy Farm in Ravenna has biotechnology manufacturers talking. Two of those companies are the $700 million Indiana-based Reynolds, Inc. and their new partner, Entec Biogas GmbH, the Austrian firm that developed the technology for the biodigester plant.
This month, the companies launched a new division with an eye to building more biodigesters in the US. Biodigesters convert animal waste to energy.
Reynolds, the general contractor on the Ravenna project, hired Sarah Lineberry, the former GVSU coordinator of the project. Lineberry expects to have an easier time selling the technology in California, Texas, and Maine—all states that, unlike Michigan, have adopted aggressive alternative and renewable energy strategies.
Such a strategy in Michigan would provide the necessary policy and financial incentives for farmers, along with the food and solid waste industries, to produce energy from their bio waste.
“Much of the $2.7 million cost of the Ravenna digester was spent with local contractors who worked on the project,” Lineberry says. “I would love to proliferate the technology here, Michigan is my home, but it’s just a lot harder here until a RPS gets put in place.”
The biodigester is an initiative of GVSU’s MAREC, and Executive Director Imad Mahawili says the US’s 200 biodigesters is far behind Germany’s 4,000 biodigesters.
“Europe started 30 years ago,” Mahawili says, “but the technology market in Germany really exploded eight years ago when they changed the RPS for Germany to provide financial incentives and establish a goal of getting 100 percent of their energy from renewable resources by 2050. They created thousands of jobs, not hundreds of jobs.”
Lineberry agrees that jobs are to be had if the incentives are in place.
“There were 50 people on site at the Den Dulk project at any given time,” she says. “The new Reynolds division probably won’t create many in-house jobs, but it will create jobs for contractors, painters, and people who install piping or do boiler startups. And these jobs would stay here because the biodigesters would be built here.”
Source: Imad Mahawili, Grand Valley State University’s Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center; Sarah Lineberry, Reynolds, Inc.
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Deborah Johnson Wood is the development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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