SBIR-STTR Award

U.S. hog farming is a $35 billion industry facing a pressing issue in the amount of manure they produce. A hog farm with 800000 hogs produces 1.6 million tons of waste per year more than the waste produced by the city of Philadelphia. One popular manure management system is anaerobic manure lagoons outdoor earthen basins filled with animal waste. However these lagoons are particularly vulnerable to natural disaster. Most recently in 2018's Hurricane Florence 96 hog-manure lagoons in North Carolina were critically flooded with 33 discharging their waste. The result was damage to downstream communities' water supply and a massive crop loss. Biomass Controls LLC is proposing to develop and validate the use of their farm-scale biogenic refinery pyrolysis-combustion process to convert lagooned hog manure to value added biochar. The biogenic refinery can improve disaster vulnerability in farm operations by providing an alternative manure disposal route and a way to safely empty and convert existing hog manure lagoons to disaster impervious biochar. Biomass Controls proposes to extend and develop a commercial application of their existing biogenic refinery suiting hog farm needs by: characterizing hog lagoon feedstock to determine any treatment necessary prior input to the biogenic refinery; optimizing the existing biogenic refinery processing to produce biochar from hog sludge; and characterizing the biochar. The proposed research would provide technical and economic results in applying the biogenic refinery to meeting the treatment needs of lagooned hog manure thereby reducing the vulnerabilities of rural communities to hazards.