Veolia Turning Poultry Poop and Scrap Wood Into Electricity

(Bloomberg) -- A Veolia Environnement SA unit agreed to operate and maintain three power plants in the U.S. Southeast that will generate electricity from burning wood waste and chicken poop.

Veolia North America currently manages a Lumberton, North Carolina, power plant that burns poultry litter and woody biomass, under a short-term contract with Georgia Renewable Power LLC. In a deal announced Tuesday, the company will get a 15-year operations and maintenance contract for the 25-megawatt facility, and also agreed to oversee two additional sites in Georgia.

Plants that burn poultry litter, as the waste mix is known, are uncommon and Georgia Renewable Power is keen to do more, David Shaffer, president and chief operating officer of Georgia Renewable Power, said in interview. The Lumberton site was converted from a coal-burning facility.

“We're considering ways of encouraging this elsewhere. Maryland has phosphate legislation,” Shaffer said in interview. “They're all kind of waiting to see how we're going to do here.”

Georgia Renewable Power is building two biomass plants in Georgia that are expected to be operational by mid-2019. The facilities will each have 66 megawatts of capacity and will use 500,000 tons annually, mainly construction and demolition wood, wood-fuel residuals and railroad ties. Veolia will operate and maintain them and Southern Co. utility Georgia Power will buy the output.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Eckhouse in New York at beckhouse@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Doan at ldoan6@bloomberg.net, Will Wade, Margot Habiby

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