Biogas is currently a profitable market in America with no governments subsidies. Microgy is a leader in large scale BioGas Facilities.
Biogas is produced from rotting organic materials such a manure, sewage, agricultural silage, animal processor waste, food processor waste.
A Biogas plant needs hot water to produce Natural Gas and the adoption of a geothermal utility would make Sandusky uniquely attractive to a BioGas facility. Couple this with a near unlimited supply of water and agricultural waste our area produces we would be a very advantageous site for development of such a facility. Add to this some very large high margin potential customers such as blacktop manufacturers and Sandusky International's Foundry. A facility such as this would be ideally situated in our industrial park that is already adjacent to farmland and has the possibility of an electrical grid interconnect to generate electricity on demand if the Compressed Natural Gas is not selling or over production occurs.
If we were to utilize the city's sewage in the biogas plant the resulting fertilizer would have to be used on non food crops such as corn for ethanol production. This would again be another natural complimentary energy production company. An Ethanol plant (distillery) uses large amounts of fresh water during ethanol production and is normally powered by natural gas. So the fertilizer from the Biogas facility would be spread on the fields that grow the corn that is distilled into ethanol. The ethanol plant uses just the cob and the stalk and husks can be utilized by the Biogas plant to produce Natural Gas to power the ethanol plant. The Geothermal utility can even reclaim lost residual heat in the distilling process to bolster the amount of thermal energy in the Geothermal Utility Thus lowering everyone's energy costs even lower.
This produces another benefit. The fertilizer produced from the biogas facility is environmental friendly and does not harm the lakes and stream like petroleum derived fertilizers and the city's water treatment plant no longer flushes our human waste into the lake. When combined the net effect is a radically cleaner Sandusky Bay.
