BY DAVID IRVIN, Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Posted on Sunday, October 21, 2007

Standing in a shed at the University of Arkansas farm near Savoy, eight miles west of Springdale, Bill Seeger grins as he points at a grid of data on a computer screen.

“See that,” he says, “142 degrees. That’s the temperature of the air going into the chicken house right now.”

It’s not that 142 degrees is particularly hot, but this silvery furnace — fueled by burning poultry litter — has been turned off for 30 minutes. Inside, temperatures have fallen from 900 degrees to about 400 degrees in the last half-hour.

Seeger and his partners at Lynndale Systems Inc., a Harrison company, lit the furnace Tuesday before dozens of university faculty from across the country who were in Fayetteville for the annual Southern Regional Water Quality Conference.

Seeger said the area’s chicken farmers are paying too much to heat their chicken houses during the winter, and this invention is the solution. But the company has some problems to overcome before the device is commercially viable.

“We need a partner,” Seeger said, explaining that a large capital investment would put them in a position to produce commercial furnaces within six months.

Other issues include modifying the machinery that delivers the poultry litter to the furnace. The mixture of poultry droppings, rice hulls and wood chips tends to “bridge” or clump up in the existing contraption.

Gene Pharr, a chicken farmer near Lincoln, which is 15 miles southwest of Fayetteville, said he thinks the litter-burning furnace is a good idea, but he wouldn’t want to sign a long note to get one.

“The problem with those types of furnaces is the high initial cost,” Pharr said. “If I could get one for, say, $ 5, 000, I would be interested in it.”

Company representatives would not say how much a unit would cost, but said they would like to keep the price below $ 20, 000.

“To be able to do that, we’d have to be in mass production,” Seeger said.

Ken Allen, the owner of Conwards 72 Degrees in Harrison, a dealer of heating and air-conditioning units, said the poultry litter furnace is getting attention from some farmers.

“We’ve been talking to customers about this and they are excited,” said Allen, who has a distribution contract with Lynndale. “They are all prepaying for propane right now, and it is killing them.”

The cost of raising chickens has increased substantially in recent years, particularly in winter since propane or natural gas is used to heat chicken houses.

The wholesale cost of propane rose 42 percent in the last year, to $ 1. 43 a gallon, according to the Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy in Washington.

Tom Costello, an associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has studied Lynndale’s system since 2004. Costello estimates that if the company could get the furnace burning at 60 percent efficiency — it runs at 35 percent efficiency now — farmers could reduce their fossil fuel use by 80 percent annually.

That would add up to more than $ 6, 000 a house annually, he said.

“I think it is possible to do it,” Costello said after the demonstration. “It’s just a matter of combustion efficiency. You have gases going out of the stack that still have energy.”

The system works like this: The farmer takes a front-end loader, scoops up poultry litter stored on the farm and dumps it into a large hopper that feeds into the furnace. Temperatures inside the furnace rise as the poultry litter burns, and the heat travels through a duct into the poultry barn. Gases go up the smokestack, and ash — which retains some fertilizer value — can be scooped out between burns.

Though Costello has not focused on emissions testing, he did detect some carbon monoxide escaping from the unit.

“It was more than you would want to see from a thermodynamics standpoint,” he said, explaining that gas emissions mean energy is escaping that could be converted to heat.

Any gas escaping is a problem for Louis Zeller, a campaign director for the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in North Carolina.

Zeller has been studying the gases that escape from a poultry litter burn, as a British company called Fibrowatt LLC considers his area for a poultry litter-burning electricity plant.

Fibrowatt recently started a new plant in Benson, Minn., and is considering Arkansas, North Carolina and other Southern states for a new plant.

“Many of the problems with burning poultry litter are based on high nitrogen content in the poultry waste,” Zeller said. Nitrogen combines with oxygen to make nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, he said.

Costello — who began investigating Lynndale’s system after his department got a $ 250, 000 grant from the federal and state governments — said low levels of nitrous oxide were detected through emissions “spot checks,” but that more testing needs to be done.

Lynndale Systems contends their invention can actually help the environment by reducing how much poultry litter ends up on the land and in the rivers.

In 2005, Oklahoma’s attorney general sued Tyson Foods Inc., George’s Inc., and other poultry processors in Northwest Arkansas accusing them of polluting the Illinois River. Many contract growers for those companies apply poultry litter to the land as fertilizer because of its nitrogen content. But it also contains phosphorus, which can cause algae plumes in rivers.

Currently, farms in the Illinois River watershed must abide by nutrient management plans before spreading litter on fields. Thousands of tons are trucked out of the watershed by BMP’s Inc., a nonprofit litter broker established by the poultry companies.

Lynndale Systems currently makes commercial wood-burning furnaces, but it was just last year that the company discovered how to burn poultry litter without adding any other fuel. Costello said another company in southwest Missouri is also working on a litter-burning furnace, but has not produced a commercial product either.