Wisconsin's First Commercial Facility to Convert Dairy Farm Waste into Renewable Biofuel

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022 -- 11:01 AM

(By Joe Schulz, Wisconsin Public Radio) Wisconsin's first commercial facility to convert dairy farm waste into renewable biofuel for vehicles broke ground earlier this month. 

According to Joe Schulz with Wisconsin Public Radio, that’s thanks to a partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and the California-based Agra Energy. The $20 million facility is located at the Dairyland Farm in New Franken.

It will use new technology to convert manure into an estimated 750,000 gallons of renewable diesel and jet fuel each year. The company hopes to have the biofuel facility up and running by January.

Agra Energy President and Chief Technology Officer Tony Long said the biofuel produced by the new facility will be cleaner than typical diesel or jet fuel. "Every gallon we make is a gallon you don't drill for, so that's a good thing," Long said.

"That means that we're using what I like to call recently sequestered carbon, versus anciently sequestered carbon. The carbon balance in the air is really upset when we use anciently sequestered carbon." Agra Energy’s focus on renewable energy is aimed at finding alternatives to power vehicles that are “pretty tough to electrify” such as heavy transit and aircraft, Long said.

"We've put a lot of our focus on those fuels because we feel like those are fuels that are needed to keep the quality of life that humanity has come to know," he said. Wisconsin is the ideal place for a facility to turn dairy manure into energy because it has an abundance of dairy farms, according to UW-Oshkosh Biogas Systems and Research Development Director Brian Langolf.

The process of converting manure to fuel begins with putting the waste through an anaerobic digester. The biodigester treats the manure, removes pathogens, reduces odor and transforms the nutrients in the manure, he said.

One of the byproducts of that process is high-energy biogas. Agra Energy’s system puts that biogas through a new micro gas-to-liquid conversion system, which converts the gas to liquid fuel, Langolf said.

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