Environmental Benefits of Heartland’s Technology


Produces Clean Burning Fuel
The fuel produced by the Heartland plants is predominantly methane gas almost identical to the natural gas consumed today. One of the recent trends has been the increase of natural gas as a percentage of total energy consumption due to its clean burning attributes. Natural gas is forecast to increase from 22% of the energy consumed in the United States in 1997 to 33% of the energy consumed in the United States by 2020. The biogas produced by the Heartland plants will increase the availability of this clean burning fuel to help meet increasing demand.

Mitigates Problems of Waste Treatment and Disposal
The Heartland process uses various organic wastes as feedstock for its biogas plants. These wastes frequently require additional funds for treatment or disposal. To illustrate the magnitude of wastes disposed of in Heartland's process, if manure is used as the organic feedstock, the plant will process the daily manure output from 130,000 head of cattle, which would produce about 5000 Mcf/day (5000 MMBtu/day). The Heartland biogas process eliminates many of the current down stream costs for these wastes. In addition, it eliminates many of the environmental risks and reduce the amount of wastes going to landfills.

Reduction in Greenhouse Gas Emissions
addition to eliminating the need to treat or dispose of the wastes, the Heartland process also reduces the greenhouse impact of the disposed wastes. Disposed organic wastes will ultimately decay and escape into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, with the additional risk to groundwater. As an example, manure from confined animal feeding operations is often spread on fields as fertilizer. This disposal process can be a risk to groundwater and the greenhouse gases produced by decaying manure will escape into the atmosphere. These gases are more significantly more destructive to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.  Producing biogas will contain these gases, which will have a positive impact on the environment.

Water Reuse
Water is an extremely valuable commodity in many arid and semi-arid areas of the world such as the western United States, which is the proposed location for many of the Heartland plants. The Heartland process that produces gas also reuses process water and significantly reduces the water requirements for the plants. Depending on the feedstock used, additional water may be reclaimed from the process and can be made available for other uses.