AURI scientist Alan Doering recently gave Minnesota’s Next Generation Energy board a lot of information to digest.
Doering gave a presentation at the October NextGen board meeting, highlighting new markets and new opportunities for dairy digester solids, the leftovers from anaerobic digestion of dairy manure. These potential uses including livestock bedding, fertilizer and being used as a replacement for peat in the nursery and landscape industry.
Doering also told the NextGen board about the interest in utilizing food and dairy processing waste, biomass and livestock manure for co-digestion to add value to lower value co-products while potentially increasing methane production. Research hurdles, such as difficulty in predicting methane potential of high moisture co-products, transportation economics and predicting large scale performance of co-digesting were also presented to the board. Doering also shared information about AURI’s lab capabilities focusing on supporting digester research and initiatives addressing digester operations.
The Next Generation Energy Board was established in 2007 to develop bioenergy policies and recommendations for the Minnesota Legislature. AURI Executive Director Teresa Spaeth is a member of the board.
