The Stranded Wind Initiative conducted a survey of the Iowa Lakes region last summer and have identified two locations that are suitable for a wind driven ammonia plant and the associated follow on businesses. The first one to be developed will be located in Graettinger, Iowa, producing over fifty full time professional, plant operations, and greenhouse/aquaculture management jobs along with several hundred hourly greenhouse and aquaculture production jobs.
Wind driven ammonia production requires a sizable wind farm, around a hundred turbines total, a small supply of clean, deionized water for hydrolysis, and a larger supply of lake or river water for cooling the operation. About half of the wind energy used in creating ammonia gets turned into heat and the amount available is sufficient to operate ten acres of hybrid greenhouse/aquaculture space.
The ammonia plant itself will consist of a hydrolysis operation that separates hydrogen from water, an air separation plant to produce diatomic nitrogen, and a Haber-Bosch style reactor to combine the two into ammonia. The ammonia plant will provide about fifteen plant operator and management jobs, while the air separation facility will employ about the same number of people.
The greenhouse/aquaculture facility will span ten acres and be built along the same lines as a hog confinement. The floor will be steel grates over "runways" where the fish are grown and the plants will be grown in a hydroponic fashion. The greenhouse will use carbon dioxide captured at local ethanol plants to raise the internal atmospheric CO2 concentration to 1,500 parts per million, five times the amount for in the air normally. When CO2 is that high insects don't reproduce so the facility should be able to qualify as organic and provide employees with a nice working environment having neither pesticides nor herbicides in use.
Electricity demands in Iowa are highest in the summer and this is when the wind blows the least. The plant may only operate fall, winter, and spring, allowing the sale of electricity into the higher demand summer months and providing jobs that fit the work schedule of farmers.
There were concerns about putting an operation needing two hundred employees into a town the size of Graettinger but there appears to be a sensible solution to this. The greenhouse will employ a core group of full time people who manage the operation but the bulk of the work will be done by part time employees. The operation will run buses to the middle schools in Emmetsburg and Estherville for their 9:00 to 3:00 shift which is set up to fit the schedule of mothers with younger children. The same buses will pick up at the high schools for the 4:00 to 9:00 shift.
The ammonia produced, about 37,000 tons a year, will be enough to fertilize roughly a thousand square miles of Iowa corn crops, or all of the land under cultivation in Emmet and Palo Alto counties and then some.
There will be a pipeline built from the plant to the railroad in Graettinger and because of this there may be additional developments in the city of Graettinger itself. There are industrial processes such as the making of some plastics, herbicides, and pesticides that require ammonia, and ammonia can be used as fuel for a diesel engine as long as you have a little bit of diesel in the cylinder to start it burning. The Graettinger Municipal Light Plant may be able to convert one of their existing generators to ammonia and meet some of the new state requirement for renewable power that way.
The development group behind this are five of the volunteers from the Stranded Wind Initiative including one man from Graettinger and another from Spirit Lake. The owners of the plant will have to be either local farmers or their cooperative in order for the operation to qualify for a federal development grant. The odds that this project will receive funding are very good and it would be built in parallel with the planned Midwest Renewables 230 megawatt Vernon township wind farm, coming online some time in 2009 or 2010.
If you would like further information about this project you can send email to info@strandedwind.org. We welcome inquiries from farmers, economic development people, or investors wishing to build a similar operation in their area.
(UPDATE: We showed this plan on 3/18 and discovered there are 300 open positions in Palo Alto County now. Back to the drawing board on this - it gets reworked to create just the high paying plant operations jobs. We suspect some other sites will take priority over this one but we've offered up the details of the plan to any community where it might fit.)
How are they planning to deal with the day to day intermittency of wind? Will they:
1) store hydrogen on site to use when the wind is too light
2) vary the output of the plant to match the available wind power
3) buy/sell power from the wind farm to the utility when the wind farm is producing less than/more than they need to operate the plant
The intermittency is solved via the regional electric grid, some local dams, and also the much larger Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO) grid. A local wind farm or farms will provide the MW-hrs per year needed to operate this facility, but those MW-hrs are not always produced at the rate and time needed for a smooth, continuous operation. But the average output of wind farms in the northern Great Plains does, as does the pumped hydroelectric storage and deferred hydroelectric generation on rivers like the Missouri. And any excess MW-hrs made by these local wind farms get used elsewhere, so things balance out.
Financialwise, this can be accommodated via Swap deals, Contract for Difference deals, as well as bilateral production agreements, and of course, a power purchase agreement or 2 from the local wind farms. The net effect is a transfer of money from the NH3/N2/greenhouse plant owners to the owners of these wind turbines, with a cut in for the local electric companies. And in return, ammonia is manufactured in a way that does not produce CO2 pollution. This NH3 is then used to mostly grow things, and so it goes. The locally made NH3 also displaces imported NH3, and this also helps with the dreadful balance of payments problem that our country has these days.
Anyway, that's the plan.
Nb41
Alan,
Hydrogen storage is possible, problematic for a variety of metallurgical reasons, but very attractive from a process level because its 90% of the energy involved - bank enough H2, then we run as we choose.
The variable output is a distinct possibility but here we run into metallurgical troubles and catalyst minimums - its not good to have the reactor get hot ... cold ... hot ... as structural things will get cranky and catalysts can get poisoned.
This last one is very interesting as it is the most conservative stance - run the plant within a sensible band, bury the reactor so we have an easier time controlling the heat level, and keep it running nonstop. The problem here is that the greenhouse needs a constant flow of heat, too, and that goes double if there are fish in the picture.
So ... the whole business will need to be simulated once the bounds are known for the various components. This is why we need the seed funding - its an interesting problem that gets engineers scratching diagrams and calculations on whatever piece of paper they have handy, but for bankers to sign we have to establish an upper and lower bound for what we can do with the thing. Oh, and we didn't address the effect of time shifting night & cool windy day summertime production in this discussion - the peaker natural gas plant replacement with an ammonia system is a significant portion of the economics of this thing.
-SCT
Anytime someone says there may be problems with maintaining a constant temperature I think "geothermal heat pump".
on this topic. I think a lot of communities can benefit from these ideas, and I know I'd like to keep up with the latest info!
This plan is great! I've been hoping to get more details about the work you guys have been planning, and this has been worth the wait! Excellent combination of enterprises to start a small-town economic system using inputs and outputs from various endeavours to maximize the opportunity. I started sketching out the production and financial models immediately in my mind. This kind of problem is what many of us have been waiting for.
I could see many synergies and offshoots from this basic plan. I have noticed ethanol plants are getting in trouble for dumping glycerin and methanol, which would another "waste" output that could be exploited in a biorefinery, possibly using research resources from universities. The pumps and transportation equipment could run on ethanol, biodiesel/ammonia, methane and hydrogen (assuming HEC-type engines).
We should build simulation models of each "module" in the plan and an input/output analysis of each one, including external existing modules like ethanol and biodiesel plants, to integrate the parameters from the technical and engineering designs you obviously have underway into a complete picture. Combined with computer models of the business and accounting forecasts (and actuals, when each enterprise comes on-line), we could create templates and calculators to help other people leverage what is learned here to get other enterprise underway and to identify other funding sources.
We need to focus on the advantages of a small town in terms of being flexible and able to adapt to a 21st century economic model, just like they did in the agricultural and manufacturing eras. Note you could promote telecommuting for administrative employees and internships with colleges and community colleges for the various disciplines you will need to design and implement each module in the whole mezzoeconomy. The economics department at ISU has done economic studies for projects like this to forecast and analyze the economic impacts and help build a case for support from the Iowa Department of Economic Development for the various small businesses involved in the matrix.
Obviously, it would be great to integrate all the small towns in the area into the program and encourage add-on businesses to emerge. Farm families would be an excellent source for bookkeeping and administrative people working remotely.
I've been buried in some projects for a while, but when I signed up the first week you went on-line, this is the kind of thing I was hoping you were talking about. You've got me fired up! Iowa can lead the world in energy independence, and small towns are the secret weapon because of their resilience, flexibility and literacy. Go for it!
But not very clearly. This is obviously fascinating stuff, but you need to explain it better. Don't assume your readers know what you're talking about. (I don't, and I write about this stuff for a living.)
I think you are saying that the plan is for a wind-powered fertilizer plant, which produces heat as a by-product. (I presume that photograph of windmills is ironic?) Nitrogen for the ammonia comes from air, hydrogen from water. But what is the final product? You can't spread NH3 on farmland. It's converted to a nitrate? How?
What's the pipeline for? Gaseous ammonia?
The greenhouse/aquaculture setup is better explained. I get it!
And this really is fabulous stuff. We are so far behind in this country, it is marvelous to see somebody working on sensible solutions.
The article there is written for a target audience - the local population, who are interested in how many new jobs come from a new plant, and what the work environment will be like. Everyone here already knows what anhydrous ammonia is and what the uses are. If you dig around in the FAQ at the bottom there are plenty of "one pagers" which explain various concepts ... including one with a picture of what goes on inside the plant.
Sorry to be so cryptic, but I'm speaking to my neighbors with this particular writing ... and they seem to be excited about it :-)
softforce,
This article is tuned for consumption by those living in the area - we placed the following ad in the employment section of local newspapers to spread the word:
I would like a chance to talk to you in person about your background and this modeling work you've just described. I have done such work for a publicly held company in the past but my plate has become rather full ... another sharp mind working on this stuff wouldn't hurt the process a bit. Drop me a note ...