GREENSBORO — Officials with the North Carolina Agricultural Energy Partnership invited authorities from across the state to a meeting in Greensboro on Friday to hear from an expert on air quality emissions directly linked to the Fibrowatt facility in Minnesota.

Fibrominn, the first poultry-litter fueled power plant in the United States., opened in Benson, Minn., in 2007. Fibrominn is a subsidiary of Fibrowatt LLC, which develops, builds, owns and operates electrical power plants fueled by poultry litter and other agricultural biomass.

Officials with that company, who are in the process of preparing an application to the state of North Carolina to build three facilities, in Surry, Sampson and Montgomery counties, were on hand to explain in detail how they have gone above and beyond government regulations to meet Minnesota and federal air quality standards.

Conrad Carter, president of Alpha Environmental Management Inc., whose company conducted an air emissions quality test of Fibrominn for the North Carolina Agricultural Energy Partnership, was the guest speaker at the event. He explained how officials at the Fibrominn plant in Benson went to an extensive degree to monitor emissions.

“Having reviewed the Best Available Control Technology section of the Minnesota air permit application, it is clear that the owners have made a major effort to build a state-of-the-art facility in Minnesota. While this technology is young and still has some challenges yet to be met, the owners, the Environmental Protection Agency and the North Carolina Department of Air Quality will all ensure that the facility will meet all current North Carolina and federal air emissions regulations and that the public health will be protected,” Carter said.

He explained that originally he tried to test the poultry burning process to that of a coal-fired boiler to determine which process is cleaner, but due to the major differences in the technologies used, it was not possible to do that. This is when the study became focused on whether the Minnesota plant meets air emissions regulations.

In his report he stated, “First of all, I need to point out that Fibrominn has had some problems with PM (particulate matter) emissions compliance, reportedly due to poor dust collector bag performance. They have told you that the PM issue has been resolved though I have not seen test data that confirms their compliance. Also, they experienced a NOx non-compliance situation in 2008 as they came out of their first annual plant shut down. It is not expected to happen again.”

Carter went on to report the levels of each chemical required to be tested in air emissions and how the Fibrominn tests resulted.

With the PM emission issue, Carter said he believed “it would seem reasonable that they will achieve compliance with the correct dust collector bag.”

All of the other chemical combinations emitted from the process tested within compliance, according to Carter’s study.

He noted, “When one looks at the (North Carolina Department of Air Quality) spreadsheets for combustion of wood and of coal, it appears that Fibrowatt has not tested for all the air toxics that NC-DAQ will be looking for in an air permit application. That will be resolved before the air permit is submitted to NC-DAQ.”

Terry Walmsley, Fibrowatt’s vice president of environmental and public affairs, said the company is working diligently to make sure that when the applications and permits are submitted in North Carolina that they meet and exceed current air quality standards.

“For us to go from the point of thinking about a plant to actually getting it permitted and up and operating is going to be a very comprehensive thing. We have heard from the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources person on how they look at our prospective facility as a safety perspective and the impact on general air quality. They look at it from the impacts to local wildlife areas, from health risks. So there’s a lot of different ways to evaluate this and there will be a very comprehensive approach. Why? So they can demonstrate that what we are doing, regardless of the situation, whether we are monitoring all the time is going to be protective of public health and the environment,” said Walmsley.

“As part of our start up, we had to supply a lot of information, continuous emission monitoring data, a lot of stack testing, to demonstrate that the way we projected when we permitted it is indeed the way it is. But, it’s not to say that the challenge of going from the start up of a plant to optimizing it wasn’t without its bumps in the road. We had those and the important thing is that when we dealt with those challenges, we made the corrections and the plant is performing properly. I think what will happen in the end is that it will be very obvious that what we did was bring up a new plant, go through the bumps and bruises of starting it up to a point now where we have it optimized,” Walmsley said.

He pointed out that the diversity of the group who came to the meeting Friday shows how important moving toward renewable energy is to the state overall.

“You have forestry people, you have Department of Agriculture people, poultry industry officials, department of congress officials. All of those realize how important renewables are going to be. You can’t ignore that. If you look at it at the federal level, that is a key criteria of both state and federal policy. This is the kind of baseline that needs to be looked at because the southeast is going to be based on biomass. All of the people here are gauging it and gathering how important it is going to be to North Carolina and all of the southeast states,” Walmsley said.

Contact Mondee Tilley at mtilley@mtairynews.com or at 719-1930.