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Sunday, 11/25/2007 4:29:00 PM

Sunday, November 25, 2007 4:29:00 PM

Post# of 1030
From todays Syracuse Sunday Newspaper -

http://www.syracuse.com/poststandard/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-12/1195984780296940.xml&coll=1

Full article here -

syracuse.com

http://www.syracuse.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-12/1195984780296940.xml&coll=1

THE POST STANDARD

Today an ethanol plant, tomorrow a renewable energy park
Volney facility hopes to attract companies that could run on each other's waste products

Sunday, November 25, 2007
By Tim Knauss
Staff writer

The former Miller brewery near Fulton soon will be home to the Northeast's first ethanol plant, which is set to begin operations early next year.

And the owners of the facility don't want to stop there.

They see the ethanol plant, which occupies 20 percent of the complex, as the first step in the development of a massive renewable energy park to include biomass, solar and other alternative sources of energy.

A newly unveiled plan for Riverview Business Park, as the former brewery in Volney is called, envisions its development as an "agro-industrial park" that would run on renewable energy. The park also would promote efficiency by attracting companies that could use each other's waste products.

If all goes according to plan, one company's waste would become another company's fuel or raw material.

Here are some of the elements that Riverview's owners would like to see:

Ö A 25- to 30-megawatt biomass 0

power plant that initially would use wood as fuel, but also could incorporate biomass fuels produced on site such as methane from liquid waste or grains left over from making ethanol.

The power plant, which would cost an estimated $50 million to $60 million, also could supply steam to the nearby ethanol facility or to other park tenants. It also could heat a fish farm that has expressed interest in coming to the site.

Ö An 800,000-square-foot installation of solar panels on the roofs of two giant warehouses. The solar power plant, which would cost $15 million to $20 million, would produce four to seven megawatts of power for park tenants.

Ö An existing wastewater treatment plant converted into an anaerobic digester to produce methane fuel from municipal sludge, farm manure or organic waste produced in the park.

Also, the treatment plant's two 16 million-gallon lagoons could be used to grow algae for biodiesel and other products. The algae could consume carbon dioxide from the power plant.

Ö Riverview hopes to attract businesses that would complement the energy projects: a fish farm that could use waste heat from the biomass plant; a soda bottler that could use carbon dioxide from the ethanol plant; and a food processor that would yield a high-strength organic waste that could be converted to fuel.

Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council who recently toured the facility, said the plan offers an opportunity to use renewable energy for broader economic development.

"It's very exciting," Greene said. "The real telling thing will be if in the next five years they can take this renewable energy development - the ethanol plant - and integrate that into some novel sets of businesses around it."

The plan for Riverview is still just a plan, but one that potential business partners are taking seriously.

Constellation Energy Group, the Fortune 200 energy company that owns Nine Mile Point nuclear station, is evaluating the possibility of building and owning the biomass power plant and the solar installation at the complex, said Eric Will II, of Pompey, who owns Riverview with partner Thomas Denney, of Cazenovia. No decisions have been made yet.

Constellation also has expressed interest in constructing a small wind farm on undeveloped land at the edge of the property.

"Constellation is very interested," said Jim Olcott, of Constellation's Syracuse office. "We're making large investments into the renewable field right now."

Miller closed the brewery in 1994. Will and Denney bought Riverview in 2000 for $6 million. They spent five years developing the Northeast Biofuels ethanol plant, before selling the majority stake in the plant last year to Permolex International, of Canada.

Although the new plan for Riverview faces many hurdles, Will said he thinks it will be easier to develop than the ethanol plant, given today's burgeoning interest in renewable energy and reduced carbon emissions.

"This is far less a stretch today than doing an ethanol plant was a few years ago," he said.

Will and Denney sold the 91 acres occupied by the ethanol plant to Northeast Biofuels, but retained the other 330 acres of the former Miller complex.

The property contains vast unused resources, including a sprawling, 700,000-square-foot warehouse and a 100,000- square-foot warehouse; a seven-story coal-fired power plant; and a 5 million-gallon-a-day wastewater treatment plant big enough for a small city.

That's not including the rail lines into the facility, the nearby Oswego River and the easy access to highways.

To find a strategy for the property, Riverview sought help this year from Operation Oswego County, the nonprofit economic development organization. With a $134,000 grant from National Grid, the Oswego group hired DeWitt engineering firm O'Brien & Gere to come up with a strategic plan. O'Brien & Gere had already done extensive work on the ethanol plant.

The plan for Riverside draws on a concept called "eco-industrial development" or "industrial symbiosis," which encourages networking between businesses to optimize resource use and cut economic and environmental costs.

"What we were trying to do was look for different business applications where one business's effluent is the influent for another process," said Tim Barry, senior vice president at O'Brien & Gere. "We try to close the loop, so you minimize or eliminate waste."

The best-known example of industrial symbiosis is the industrial city of Kalundborg, Denmark, where a web of mutually beneficial transactions has grown up among a major power plant, an oil refinery, a drug company, a plasterboard manufacturer and a host of smaller entities nearby.

Examples: The coal-fired power plant sells steam to the oil refinery and the drug company. The power plant's cooling water is used to heat a fish farm. Gypsum from the power plant is sent to the plasterboard company. Its fly ash is used in cement.

Treated wastewater from the drug company and from the city return to the coal plant, which uses it for cooling, thereby cutting water consumption by 60 percent.

But eco-industrial development is not easy to put into practice, said Norman Scott, a professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University who has studied the role of such systems in agriculture.

The concept offers great potential to rural and agricultural communities, but each development depends on the unique characteristics of the local situation. The challenge, Scott said, is to structure agreements between various participants.

"It sort of adds complexity to things," Scott said. "You can definitely, on paper, think about all these potential systems you can put together. But in the final analysis, are people willing to work together and cooperate and create the synergies so that it really can happen?"

Will is optimistic.

He points out that the ethanol plant already involves a variety of symbiotic agreements: Perdue Farms brings in the corn for Northeast Biofuels and sells the plant's leftover grains as dairy food; Linde, formerly BOC Gases, takes the waste carbon dioxide for resale; and GS Fulton Biodiesel recently struck a deal to extract corn oil from the ethanol plant's leftover grains to use for making biodiesel.

But there isa potential obstacle that Will fears could slow the project.

Renewable energy developers typically rely on a variety of government incentives or subsidies to make their projects economically viable. In this state, a significant source of help is New York's so-called renewable portfolio standard. The state uses money collected from utility bills to support renewable projects, with the aim of making 25 percent of the state's energy renewable by 2013.

But most of the money available under the renewable portfolio standard goes to generating plants that sell electricity to the grid. The plan at Riverview is to consume most of the energy within the park. Although there is some state money for customer-sited projects, it's geared toward projects much smaller than those contemplated at Riverview.

Representatives from Riverview, O'Brien & Gere and Constellation recently traveled to Albany to discuss the issue with representatives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which administers the renewable portfolio standard.

Will said he hopes state officials will find a way to support the renewable projects at Riverview. He did not specify how much assistance would be needed.

"Five years from now, if all we've done is build an ethanol plant, it's something we'll be proud of, but at the same time I'll be disappointed," Will said, "because there are so many other opportunities that we need to pursue."

Contact staff writer Tim Knauss at tknauss@syracuse.com or 470-3023.

© 2007 The Post-Standard. Used with permission.

Copyright 2007 syracuse.com. All Rights Reserved.

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