Zeeland company to use landfill gases for power
by Paul W. Jackson
 The real work of laying the pipeline to bring methane gas from the local landfill to Zeeland Farm Services was going on while... |
Putting together a business plan and meeting budgets isn't easy for any business, but there was one problem in particular that troubled Cliff Meeuwsen, president of Zeeland Farm Services Inc. (ZFS). The family-run agricultural business was using the equivalent of 1,300 home's worth of natural gas a year, plus electricity, but it wasn't consumption that was the problem. It was the cost fluctuation.
"We needed to stabilize our energy costs," Meeuwsen said. "With the price of natural gas going up and down and up and up, we had to find a way to control it."
The solution was as close as the local landfill, which, by the end of the year, will pump all the methane gas ZFS needs to power the business's soybean processing facilities.
"This $4.5 million investment gives a whole new meaning to the word landfill," Meeuwsen said at the groundbreaking ceremony for the pipeline that will bring methane to ZFS. "We no longer can look at the landfill as just waste. It's a job provider and an energy source too. We hope the emission reductions facilitated by this project will clean the air and allow other local businesses to expand and create jobs within west Michigan."
The project, a first for western Michigan, was a two-year collaboration between ZFS, Waste Management of Michigan, owner of the Autumn Hills landfill six miles southeast of ZFS, and North American Natural Resources, Inc. And while Meeuwsen said the project involved two years of negotiations, tax abatements and contracts; and wore out at least one ZFS computer, the investment will pay dividends long after the landfill is full.
 ...Dignitaries ceremonially broke ground for the six-mile pipeline. From the left are Zeeland Township Supervisor Bradley Slagh, Zeeland Farm Services founder Rober Meeuwsen and MDEQ's chief of pollution prevention programs Robert Jackson. |
"Gas will be produced from the landfill 40 to 50 years" after it stops accepting waste from Ottawa, Kent and other counties, said Randy Dozeman, district manager of Waste Management of Michigan. "We took agricultural land out of production to build the landfill, and now we're returning a byproduct to an agricultural business."
Initially, the methane from the landfill will be used in ZFS's boilers, which will be converted to use methane to produce heat and steam used to process beans. Eventually, however, methane will be used to produce electrical power for the entire operation, which has grown from an agricultural hauler and elevator in 1950, when Robert Meeuwsen founded the company, to a three- division industry employing 150 people, including 11 Meeuwsen family members.
The process begins when the methane gas is captured at the landfill and compressed in a facility being constructed by North American Natural Resources.
"The gas is compressed, run through after-coolers and then a dryer that knocks out excess liquids," said Robert Evans, president of North American Natural Resources, based in Okemos. "So only dry gas goes to ZFS."
Once that process is complete, the gas is pushed through the pipeline to ZFS, where the energy is truly "green," according to Christine White, deputy director of agricultural policy with the Michigan Department of Agriculture.
"This project has so many environmental benefits, especially for air quality," she said. "It fits in with Governor Granholm's vision for being on the cutting edge, and it is equivalent of taking 21,000 cars off the road per year."
Unlike the energy that keeps cars moving, methane is no finite source, at least as long as people bury their garbage in huge pits. But when the flame that currently burns off the gas at the landfill goes out, it won't necessarily mean the energy source is gone. It may well mean that garbage has turned to energy, and ZFS, once again, will have been a pioneer not only for farmers, but the entire community.
For more information about ZFS, read the story of its soybean oil refinery, built in 2003, in the June 15, 2003 edition of Michigan Farm News on the Web at michiganfarmnews.com