Maryland farm turning manure into energy

The Maryland Department of Agriculture and Irish agri-tech company Biomass Heating Solutions Limited, or BHSL, have committed nearly $3 million toward manure-to-energy technology that they hope will significantly reduce the impact of Murphy's chickens — and perhaps one day all Eastern Shore poultry — on the Chesapeake Bay.  "Our main objective is bird enhancement," BHSL project engineer James O'Sullivan said. "We want to completely diminish ammonium (from Murphy's chickens to the bay). We want to reduce humidity (in the chicken houses) and have a drier atmosphere for the birds, hence drier manure." The project was completed and went online in December. While O'Sullivan oversees the equipment on the farm, BHSL runs it off-site."The whole system is fully automated," O'Sullivan said. "It is controlled by our remote operations team in Ireland."The farm houses more than 160,000 chickens — a large number, no question — but a fraction of the 300 million "broilers," or chickens bred specifically for meat production, that the USDA says the state produces annually.O'Sullivan says the chickens on Murphy's farm can produce as much as 10 tons of manure a day. BHSL utilizes a process called fluidized bed combustion, which works by heating a bed of sand inside a fuel combustion chamber until bubbling at 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Once this level is reached, manure is fed into the chamber and the temperature is raised to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. This process produces hot gases, which in turn are used to boil water that ultimately heats the chicken houses.Not only does the process heat the chickenhouses with clean, renewable energy, it keeps the manure off the ground and out of the waterways.