Source:
St. Lawrence County Board of Legislators, Massena Town Council, Brasher Town Board, St. Lawrence County Industrial Development Agency, St., Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce, Massena Business Development Corporation, and Bion TEchnologies, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, p.77 (2007)
URL:
http://www.biontech.com/news/documents/StLawrenceCo%20Nuisance%20Odor%20Report-Hopke%20et%20al%2010-31-07.pdf
Abstract:
INTRODUCTION
Bion Technologies is proposing the construction of integrated facilities to produce ethanol and beef cattle in St. Lawrence County with a minimum of discharges and maximal use of the energy and materials used as input to the various components of the project. In particular, the wet residual fermentation mash that is the byproduct of the ethanol production will be fed to 84,000 beef cattle, the manure residuals of which will be used as fuel for the process heat required to ferment and distill the ethanol. The outline of this project is provided by the BionTechnologies Executive Summary that is provided as Appendix 1 of this report.
The 84,000 cattle are proposed to be divided into groups of 14,000 that will be housed and fed in 6 feeding operation units that will be located with an average distance of 10 miles from the ethanol plant. At this time, the actual sites of these feeding operations are unknown, thus we will need to evaluate a generic plan for each of the feeding operation sites.
The conceptual framework for each of the six feeding operations is outlined in Appendix 2, provided to us by Dr. James Morris of Bion Technologies. The general framework is a central core of 4 barns, each of which will be 2 acres in area and house 3,500 cattle. These barns will be distributed around the Bion Technologies proprietary bioreactor system. This system will treat the waste to produce dried bricks of the large solids that will be trucked back to the ethanol plant, consolidate the nutrients into the fine solids such that they can be used as fertilizer, and the water will be dispersed into a constructed wetland/agricultural zone surrounding the feeding operation facilities as shown in Figure 1 (taken from Appendix 2).
The purpose of the consulting contract to Drs. Hopke, Grimberg, and Rogers was to evaluate the probability of nuisance odors arising from a feeding operation as planned and to report to the County and Bion Technologies if the current design would likely lead to complaints of odors. Odor is not currently regulated, but would produce local dissatisfaction with the site selection and operation of the feeding operations. Thus, we have endeavored to evaluate the generic design recognizing that site specific designs might have quite different configurations as noted in the document in Appendix 2.