GRRO News
ON THE GROW WITH GRRO: CUTTING-EDGE TECHNOLOGY
Eldora, Iowa – February 25, 2006
By Kent Thompson
Managing Editor, Iowa Falls Times-Citizen
Inventor, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Eldora's Loran Balvanz
comprises elements of all three to develop successful businesses. He
has done so in the past in Florida and is doing so today in Hardin
County.
His Global Resource Recovery Organization's (GRRO) Tempest Drying
System has found a way to remove the water in animal waste (also
virtually eliminating the odor component). Now, Balvanz is ready to
apply the new technology to all types of waste products, from pulp and
paper to municipal waste, from coal fines to industrial sludge.
The applications are as limitless as the imagination. Balvanz has that
along with the business savvy to see the projects carried out.
Background
Balvanz grew up in the Eldora area and it is his ties to the local
community that have brought him back here to test and develop the
Tempest System.
I used to have a construction company and built golf courses and
subdivisions in the south. After I sold that, I gravitated to the
resource recovery industry which was basically a company doing wood and
yard waste recycling, anything of that nature that was being sent to a
landfill or piled up and burned.
That company really took off in Florida because they prohibited the
filling of landfills with yard waste. We thought we should offer a
service to municipalities to recycle their wood product waste. We wrote
19 contracts in 11 1/2 months, Balvanz said. We jumped from puddling
along to $9 million in revenue in one year flat.
Then we were noticed by the Kenetec group in California that built
waste energy power plants. We provided 1 million tons of biomass to
their energy plants on a yearly basis. We did a merger with them and
wound up going public. I sold that in 1996.
A lot of people from municipalities and the industry said, 'If you can
attack the biosolids, animal wastes, any of that stuff, the
environmental issues are coming.' The problem was, we didn't have the
tools, Balvanz said.
That's the reason we were so excited about getting a $500,000 grant
with the Farm Pilot Coordination (FPPC) Inc., in conjunction with the
Natural Resources Conservation Service. Although this is our second
pilot project, this project will allow us to take the Tempest
technology to all animal waste, Balvanz said.
The federal government will usually hand problems to universities. They
will study it to death and come up with white papers. That doesn't get
you to commercialization. This year, in conjunction with farmers and
people who have pigs, (the goal) is to build a full-scale operation
that will remove the manure from the confinement unit, run it through
the dryer building two or three times a day and provide nearly 100
percent nutrient recovery in a nearly moisture-free pelletized form,the
GRRO president and CEO said.
How the system works
The waste product dries, not through thermal heat, but by using
high-velocity cyclonic air patterns at speeds of 300-500 miles per hour
with only 3-5 pounds of air pressure. We create a perfect
tornado,Balvanz said of the Tempest system.
It's like the old cream separator. The cream moves at a different rate
of speed than the milk. We are actually shearing the moisture away from
the product. We evaporate very little. We are atomizing it. Then we
take the air and moisture from the machine and run it through a water
scrubber to knock down any airborne particulates and release that back
into the atmosphere.
The blowers run at 10,000-15,000 cubic feet per minute. That's a bunch
of air. We tested the unit in Ireland and people stood under the
exhaust and could not feel one droplet of anything on them because it
is atomized (as fine as the particulates in a hairy spray bottle),he
said.
Prior to the full drying process, the material is initially heated by
the waste heat from a diesel engine with an electronic fuel control.
The dried product (depending on the organic compound) can be stored as
animal feed or organic fertilizer without additional heat. Because it
hasn't been heat dried in the conventional sense, the product will
retain its nutrient value.
Unlimited applications
We already have talked with Perdue Farms, one of the largest poultry
producers in the U.S. They have a very sophisticated manure-handling
system. They produce fertilizers, but they still have to dry it. They
brought product out here, we dried it and they said, 'let's test and do
more. The exciting opportunity will have Balvanz taking one of the
Tempest Drying Systems and placing it in the Chesapeake Bay area of
Virginia. We will be able to show full commercialization of taking
chicken waste to full pelletization to shipping it around the world as
a value-added product.
We also talked to Insta-Pro. They make extruders and can extrude oils
from just about any kind of grain and can rupture the cell and
sterilize just about anything. The avian bird flu disease is coming and
there are problems getting rid of spent birds. I'm taking a proposal to
the FPPC where the infected birds would be euthanized in a humane
manner and ground up with soybean meal. When the process is finished,
it will be sterilized and we will be able to dry it and pelletize it.
They have passed the physical hurdles of sterilization. There's no half
a percent of a gram of something. It is complete, Balvanz said.
He also said discussions will be under way to work with dairies in the
San Joaquin Valley in California on drying and reformulating their
wastes.
The drying system has applications to almost any organic-based waste
stream imaginable.
Tembec, a conglomerate company of paper and wood pulp mills in Canada
with a U.S. location in Louisiana, has looked at utilizing the system
for its waste stream.
Their product looks like Play Dough and if you tried to dry it in drum
dryer, it would catch fire. This is the only way to dry and recycle a
product like that,Ó Balvanz said.
GRRO has also done studies drying grape skins, sugar beet pulp, orange
peels, onion skins and other waste substances.
We now know and have proposals that we hope we can put together, to
supply the power for an ethanol plant to replace the natural gas.
Essentially, all I'm going to do is sell them steam. We can do that
with corn stalks, pulp and paper waste, wood chips. There's a cardboard
plant (Weyerhauser in Cedar Rapids) where, if we put a dryer behind
their building and made fuel pellets from their waste, we could provide
enough energy to supply four ethanol plants, Balvanz said.
Why isn't anyone doing it?
Because it's too easy to go down (to the plant) and turn on the natural
gas switch to power the plant, but those days are going to change.
Balvanz is also signing an agreement with a group in Florida to take
the dried distillers grains, an ethanol plant co-product, and dry them
with the Tempest dryer and produce a syn gas, which the company would
in turn use to heat its plant.
Balvanz said about seven semi loads a day of corn stalks, wood chips or
wood waste would be enough to replace the energy for the Pine Lake Corn
Processors ethanol plant expansion. That's not hard to get, he said.
Future goals
While the applications for the Tempest Drying System have grown, the
size of the system has shrunk. The GRRO engineers have been able to
reduce the physical size of the unit to fit on a portable trailer that
can be moved to different sites, or left at a central location.
I can see units that farmers would not have to buy but they could
deliver waste to a central secure building location. A cooperative
could own it and farmers could deliver product 24 hours a day, seven
days a week. One unit could take care of 50 hog buildings. It would
certainly lower costs and with the 100 percent nutrient utilization for
a fertilizer product, it would make much more sense than land-applying
liquid manure for ground use.
We are working with fertilizer manufacturers and there are a lot of
uses for the drying of legumes and proteins as well. There are studies
about making an organic adhesive for wallboard from pig manure. A
development like that could increase the value by 50 cents a pound,
Balvanz said.
An Iowa State University study showed that just by taking the water out
of animal waste can reduce the odor factor by 80-85 percent, Balvanz
said.
We've spent a lot of money on technology because all of the information
has been put into a computer database,the GRRO CEO said. We can predict
air flow, temperature, velocity and other measurements.
The technological applications we have adopted could allow us to make a
drying system as large as a house or as small as a large tabletop,
Balvanz said.
He has had discussions with a laboratory in California about a drying
system for its research facility.
The only way to dry their samples are thermal heat in a dryer or
radiation in a microwave, which can destroy the integrity of the
product. This system is something they could use. I can see a day in
the future when we will license someone to dry specimen products,
Balvanz said.
While animal manure has been the bane of some rural residents living
close to confinement buildings, and a problem for producers to find
adequate application sites in an environmental and cost-effective
manner, Balvanz believes his system of leaving the nutrient in and
taking the moisture out will meet all of the issues of soil, water and
air pollution very quickly.
The dried product can't be over applied and because it's time-released,
it actually builds the soil, and in dry years it won't leach into the
rural water table.
Investing in such a product would seem to make environmental and
political sense, he says. The EPA is coming and producers will have to
deal with it.
For more information on GRRO, call 1-800-800-1812 or log on to
www.grro.net.