2010 Team NEO Awards: Public-Private Partnership

When quasar energy group was planning its expansion into the waste-to-energy market, leaders of the Cleveland company looked to Germany’s well-established anaerobic digestion industry for guidance.

“The biggest question we had was: Why are there 4,000 digesters in Germany and only, say, 300 in the United States and maybe 80 percent are not even working?” says Clemens Halene, quasar’s vice president of engineering. The answer: German companies have strong ties to laboratories where they can analyze incoming waste, test recipes and guarantee energy output.

That sent quasar looking for a research partner, and The Ohio State University’s Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster became the obvious choice.

“The OARDC is the largest agbioscience park of its type in the nation, and we’ve had this vision for a long time to turn it into a tool for economic development for Wayne County,” says Wayne Economic Development Council president Rod Crider.

The wait ended when quasar’s research lab and 550,000-gallon digester facility became the first tenant of the BioHio Research Park. The digester annually turns 19,382 wet tons of spoiled food, manure, crop waste and grasses into methane, which in turn can generate 4,252 megawatts of electricity. That’s enough, quasar spokeswoman Caroline Henry says, to offset the OARDC campus’s annual energy demands by a third.

Besides clean power, the university gets a place to send students for hands-on learning and eventual employment and a venue in which to apply research. Already one Ohio State professor is working with quasar to widen the variety of waste the digesters accept to include more woody matter, Henry says.

“Recently, universities like Ohio State have been taking a closer look at the potential for their research and getting it commercially applied,” Crider says. “The OARDC has been one place where the potential for that is particularly significant.”

Scientists with quasar use the lab to tailor each of the company’s digesters to the waste stream they serve. The company’s first facility, in Akron, is fed only sewage. The Wooster digester processes agricultural waste, such as corn husks and manure from Wayne County’s dairy industry. Facilities under construction in Zanesville and Columbus will process combinations of waste that is yet to be determined but will almost certainly be different from the others.

At first glance, the digesters might not look like more than large holding tanks, but they're loaded with components, from hinges to hoses and pipes, most of which must be made specifically for quasar. That, Crider says, “creates a potential for other companies along the supply chain to locate in close proximity.”

Aside from power-producing gas, byproducts of the anaerobic process include carbon dioxide, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and heat — “basically everything that enhances the growth of algae,” Halene says.

Working with university researchers who hope to harvest high-grade oil from algae grown on the campus, quasar plans to lend its effluent to the effort, taking back the post-extraction waste to feed its digester.