ROKYTNE, Ukraine – For most people, manure is just an unpleasant, useless by-product of livestock farming.
Not for Ihor Reddikh. A designer of biogas stations and CEO at Zorg Biogas AG, Reddikh sees animal waste as a valuable input for his business, which can output a tidy profit.
Reddikh’s most recent development – a biogas plant in the town of Rokytne in southern Kyiv Oblast – is going to bring in an estimated €2.3 million in revenues since opening in October 2015. The second biggest of its kind in Ukraine, Rokytne biogas station has a generating capacity of 2.25 megawatts and sells its power at a feed-in tariff to the local state electricity company.
Decaying industry
Rokytne, a city of 11,000 citizens in the south of Kyiv Oblast, was once most famous for its sugar refining plant. But after the Soviet Union collapsed, the sugar production sector went into long-term decline, eventually resulting in the temporary closure of the plant in 2015.
Today, the sugar refinery is a monument to the failure of the Soviet-era planned economy – the plant’s vast territory is largely abandoned and derelict, with its main building standing empty in the middle. The only places on the territory that are working are the entry checkpoints and the Rokytne biogas plant. The two facilities, the sugar refinery and biogas plant, are owned by Yuriy Bondarchuk, the head of the Silgospprodukt agricultural holding.
A worker of Rokytne biogas plant walks through the territory of the station, passing by the fields of bilberry. (Pavlo Podufalov)
Compared to the now-idle sugar refinery, which used to employ 600 workers, the biogas station is tiny – only 12 employees from the town of Rokytne are needed to maintain the operation of the whole plant. Almost all of the production processes work automatically.
Viktoria Bukatina is one of five people who works at the station daily as a laboratory assistant. Her job is to monitor the biomass fermentation process and check its output, and the moisture of the biomass. Before working at the biogas plant, she was employed at the sugar refinery.
Although she has two degrees from Kyiv universities, Bukatina wants to keep working at the Rokytne biogas plant and has no intention of leaving her hometown. “I’m more of a homely person,” she says.
To build the biogas plant, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development granted a loan of €7.1 million, while the rest of the total of €12 million in financing was provided by the owner, Bondarchuk. At the current rate, the station will pay off the loan in six years, according to Reddikh.
The biogas plant consists of four reactors of 3,600 cubic meters, half-buried under the ground, two generators with a total generating capacity of 2.25 megawatts, a two-level control station, and a biogas flare. Unoccupied land has been planted with bilberries, which will yield their first harvest this summer.
Viktoria Bukatina, a laboratory assistant of the biogas plant, checks moisture of biomass at the laboratory of Rokytne biogas plant. (Pavlo Podufalov)
It had been assumed that the plant would operate on beet pulp – the waste from sugar production. However, the two large silage pits in front of the biogas plant are now almost empty. After the sugar refinery was closed, production was mainly reoriented to chicken droppings, cow dung from nearby farms, and byproducts from distilling. “It is worse for chicken droppings to lie and decompose on a field, as they release methane, a greenhouse gas,” Reddikh says. The biogas plant doesn’t just produce power and profit – it’s effectively a waste recycling plant as well, he says.
The process of extracting energy from the droppings starts at the loading stations – the only place where the unpleasant odor from the biomass is apparent. After the liquidized biological waste is loaded, it is pumped through a pipeline into a large tank, where it is blended into a uniform slurry and heated to the required temperature.
Sitting at a control panel, an engineer uses a walkie-talkie to communicate with other staff of the biogas plant. (Pavlo Podufalov)
After that, the biomass is pumped into one of four digesters, where biogas is released day-and-night through anaerobic digestion by microbes. Once it is syphoned off, the biogas can be utilized for electricity or heat production. At the Rokytne plant, internal combustion engines are used to generate electricity from the gas. The energy produced at the plant can provide power for about 800 homes.
The by-product of biogas production is natural fertilizer, which is used on the fields cultivated by Silgospprodukt. “There are no waste products, only useful products,” Reddikh says.
Biogas boom
Since its founding in 2006, Zorg Biogas AG has built around 60 biogas plants in 18 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, although only four of them are located in Ukraine. Today, Zorg has two offices, one in Ukraine and one in Switzerland. “In 2007, we were told that we were crazy, that it couldn’t be true, that it was impossible to generate electricity from manure,” Reddikh says, recalling the first days of the business.
But once the feed-in tariff for energy generated from biomass was introduced in 2013, the market started to expand. Zorg’s next goal is to build a 12.5-megawatt biogas station in Khmelnytska Oblast with 15 reactors, which is expected to produce five times more power than the plant in Rokytne. “It is the biggest biogas station under construction in the world this year,” Reddikh says.
The new plant will have to be launched and connected to the local power grid by 2019 in order to qualify for the feed-in tariff. The tariff will apply to renewable energy produced from biomass until 2030, bringing in €0.12 per kilowatt sold from 2017 to 2019. The price will then be reduced to €0.08 by 2030.
Reddikh expects the law on renewable energy to fuel growth in the market for biogas stations over the next three years. “Ukraine has woken up, although we had lost a bit of belief,” Reddikh said about the development of the biomass market. “A new government has come to power, and these changes have had a good effect on us.”
Chief engineer Viktor Ilto (L) of Rokytne biogas plant and its developer Ihor Reddikh, CEO at Zorg Biogas AG, walk on the territory of the station in Rokytne, Kyiv Oblast. (Pavlo Podufalov)
According to Reddikh, biogas is a promising segment of renewable energy because Ukraine has a strong agricultural sector, which in turn produces a lot of waste. Other “green” energy options are less promising, as Ukraine lacks strong, constant air currents to run wind turbines, and sunny weather for producing solar energy is not available year-round.
In Ukraine, the biogas market now consists of 15 stations and accounts for 0.01 percent of the entire energy market, but Reddikh expects it to grow because of the incentives provided by the government in the form of the feed-in tariff. However, most of the present plants have been built just to supply individual farms with power and gas.
In contrast, Germany has suspended the construction of similar stations due to a market glut – there are 9,000 biogas plants operating in that country as of today. “There is just not enough waste there (in Germany),” Reddikh said. “They even grow corn as a raw renewable resource… We (in Ukraine) are just at the beginning.”
