Renewables roadshow: transforming waste into a cleaner Cowra

Extract from The Guardian

An innovative bioenergy project in New South Wales could produce enough electricity to supply 5,000 homes and produce fertiliser

Renewables roadshow – Cowra: ‘It goes from being waste to a resource’

Michael Slezak

Thursday 6 April 2017 14.16 AEST

Ed Fagan’s family has been farming the same 1,600-hectare block of land in Cowra, about 240km west of Sydney, since 1886.
These days Cowra is a shire of nearly 13,000 people and straddles the Lachlan river. It’s a diverse agricultural town with a strong industrial sector. And if a keen group of locals get their way, it could soon be home to an innovative bioenergy project that cleans up waste, produces renewable energy and creates valuable fertiliser as a byproduct.
Fagan’s Mulyan farm produces everything from lamb to popcorn, including wheat, canola, beetroot and asparagus. You may well have bought his produce in your local supermarket.
But standing among a field of popcorn, Fagan explains it’s is what doesn’t make it to the supermarket shelves that’s driving his interest in a new energy projectcalled Clean Cowra. “Farming, not only here in Australia but globally, is a marginal occupation,” Fagan says. “We can no longer afford to have waste. We need to be able to utilise everything.”

Most agricultural waste occurs at the end of the farming process – after it’s been grown, nurtured and harvested. Fagan says much of it is a result of supermarkets and consumers wanting their produce to look a particular way.
“We’ve put all the inputs in to grow it and harvest it, and at the eleventh hour we need to find a new home for it, which is normally fed to sheep or cattle,” Fagan says. “We need that product to give us a return that the premium product does because it has cost us the same to get it there.
“[Clean Cowra] would be able to utilise that waste product and turn it into energy, heat and fertiliser.” Clean Cowra aims to build a 12MW renewable generator in the town that would take waste – everything from crop waste through to abattoir waste and sewage – and digest it with bacteria.
The generator works like a giant cow stomach and the combination of waste and bacteria produces natural gas, which is collected and then burnt to produce both heat and electricity. A sludge is produced at the end of the process, which would be a valuable fertiliser for farmers in the community.

Cowra’s local sewage treatment facility will host a trial version of the bioenergy project. Photograph: Guardian Australia

At 12MW, it could satisfy 60% of the town’s energy needs – or roughly what is consumed by the 5,000 homes there. Fagan is happy to give his waste to the project, and in return, gets fertiliser he would otherwise be paying for.
He can also see the benefit of locally owned power generation. “Energy prices are going up. They are going to continue to go up,” he says. “So anything we can do to have our own little power plant sitting on our doorstep is really beneficial.”
Dylan Gower, an architect who lives just outside Cowra, has been working to set up the innovative bioenergy project for more than four years through the Clean Cowra community group. (“Clean” stands for “Cowra Low Emissions Action Network”, although Gower can’t explain why the name both begins and ends with the word “Cowra” …)

This year looks set to be make-or-break for the ambitious project, with a proof-of-concept plant scheduled to be built this month. “That will be around a one to two-megawatt plant,” Gower says. Depending on the outcomes of the trial, Gower says they will raise capital and intend to have the plant going ahead within the next 12 months.
The plant will be built at the local sewage treatment facility, a short drive from Fagan’s farm. One of the treatment ponds there will be covered over to stop oxygen from getting in. Methane will be produced as the waste is digested by anaerobic bacteria, which will in turn be collected and burned.
No electricity will be produced at the proof-of-concept facility, although it would be relatively simple to implement once a reliable source of gas is established. “We are taking the feedstocks, converting them to gas, and establishing the values for a plant such as this,” Gower says. The small plant will be a key test for the project, allowing the group to figure out what waste products work best, and precisely what quality of gas is produced.
The final project would involve many of the diverse Cowra community in one way or another – by taking their waste, providing them with energy or selling them fertiliser.

And Cowra’s mayor, Bill West, says there has been nothing but support for the bioenergy project. The council itself has supported the project to the tune of $80,000, as well as providing advice, expertise and hosting the facility at the sewage plant.
“The community is very happy to embrace new technology around energy particularly,” West says. “It’s going to have the environmental impact of reducing our normal waste ... and we get some value out of them and reduce landfill. More broadly, the community has become very much aware of the need to look at new sources of energy, and renewable energy, particularly.”
The final project could cost as much as $35m to establish, Gower says. To get there, someone will have to finance the project – something that can be difficult when most banks don’t have experience in financing similar projects in Australia.
But Gower is determined to make it happen, and he thinks the value of the project makes it impossible to ignore. “What we’re trying to achieve with Clean Cowra is to get the community to value their own resources,” he says, before quipping: “Another way of putting that could be, potentially, that we actually deal with our own shit.”