Clear water revival

Part 2 in a 2-part series

If one day in the not too distant future you see a slick black powder on Shenandoah Valley poultry farms, you might think they’ve struck oil.

You would be right.

With normal poultry litter and its excess nutrients washing into the region’s streams and rivers, biologists at Virginia Tech sought a way to prevent the runoff that is contributing to the harm being done to the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed.

And thanks to a $7.7 million federal grant for something called a pyrolysis unit, poultry litter can be converted into bio-oil, bio-gas or char, the latter of which can then be laid down on farms. The powder doesn’t wash into streams as fast, and when it does, it contains fewer nutrients.

The mobile pyrolysis unit – the first of its kind anywhere, according to Virginia Tech’s Foster Agblevor, associate professor of biological systems engineering – was on display during a cool, late-October afternoon at Oren Heatwole’s poultry farm.

It has the potential to not only reduce harmful runoff, but to one day become a separate, money-making business for poultry farmers.

There are some hitches, though.

For one, each machine can serve up to 50 poultry farms. With about 1,000 poultry farms in the Shenandoah Valley, it will take millions of dollars to build the 20 machines needed.

Also, the technology in the current machine is still in the refining stages, meaning, Agblevor says, that it won’t be fully operational for about another two years. And once it is, farmers will need up to $5,000 to pay for their share of the machine.

“I think that the purpose of all of this is to determine the efficacy of it, whether it will be cost-effective,” said Hobey Bauhan, president of the Virginia Poultry Federation.

While agriculture accounts for more than 40 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus loads entering the watershed, it’s far from just poultry litter that harms it.

Another 20 percent of nutrient loads comes from wastewater treatment plants – 483 plants are in the watershed, 124 of those in Virginia.

Virginia Department of Environmental Quality mandates have spurred massive upgrade projects to wastewater treatment plants throughout the state while the plants strain under budget cuts to meet the Dec. 31, 2010, deadline for reducing by millions of pounds the amount of nutrients entering the watershed.

Waynesboro is part of the building boom, and is nearly 20 percent complete on $24 million worth of upgrades to its wastewater treatment plant.

Once the upgraded plants come online, Robert Brent, a regional Total Maximum Daily Load Coordinator for the DEQ, expects to see a tangible reduction in nutrients entering the 64,000-square-mile watershed.

The 2010 goal is to reduce to 43.5 million pounds of nitrogen and 3.3 million pounds of phosphorus coming yearly from wastewater treatment plants. Five plants, including one in Richmond, are responsible for nearly half of the 10.4 million pound yearly goal to reduce.

The Environmental Protection Agency hopes pollution caps it enacted Nov. 20 will help the cause. It will allocate “loadings” of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment to all jurisdictions in the six states – and the District of Columbia – that make up the watershed.

And in what it is calling “a new strategy” to speed the cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay and the watershed, the Chesapeake Executive Council – made up of executives from six bay states, the District of Columbia, two federal agencies and the Chesapeake Bay Commission – will focus on short-term milestones on its way to a hard deadline for the bay’s restoration. It believes the long-term goals it had previously set, but has not achieved, are not enough.

“Setting goals that are a decade out, for example, do not create pressure to produce results,” said Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine, the incoming executive council chairman, in a statement. “We’re going to change the way goals are set.”

However, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation last week engaged in a protest in Washington, D.C., to highlight failures in watershed cleanup.

In October, the Bay Foundation joined with allies in filing a notice of intent to sue the EPA for failing to enforce the Clean Water Act and clean up the bay by 2010, as the agency had promised in a 2000 agreement.

Meanwhile, scientists from Washington & Lee University also want to be part of the watershed solution. The university has received a $750,000 grant to develop a program to tackle pollution issues.

For the fecal bacteria, Brent said there is some public money, as well as aid from the Chesapeake Bay Funders Network, for farmers to fence off cattle from streams.

But the biggest problem of all in this area – the mercury in the South River – will also take the longest to solve.

The problem stems from large discharges of mercury by DuPont (now Invista) dating back to 1929 and lasting 21 years. The scope of the problem has, according to Brent, changed little over time, with the amount of mercury not diminishing as much as expected.

Since the DEQ began monitoring fish tissue data in the 1970s, mercury levels have, he said, stayed about the same. A fish consumption health advisory was issued in 1977 and remains in effect today.

Though the problem isn’t deeply embedded in the South River, it is in the sediment that washes into the South River during rain events.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental action group, says time is the solution to the mercury problem.

Because mercury doesn’t break down like other pollutants, ultimately it will immerse itself into the sediment at the bottom of lakes, rivers and oceans, and will be covered with more sediment. Most mercury-cleaning solutions involve regulatory efforts.

“At some point, fish stop consuming the mercury, so eventually it ceases to be a hazard to humans,” the NRDC says on its Web site.

Mercury, if consumed in high doses through fish, could have harmful health effects – particularly on women and children.

Brent said that whatever farmers or localities do, they don’t need to be as focused on the rest of the Chesapeake Bay watershed because everyone has a self-serving interest in keeping local waterways clean. He said the Chesapeake Bay gets “a small piece of the problem” from thousands of rivers that drain into it. Improving the watershed, he said, is not “out of reach.”

“My feeling on that is that if, in individual localities, if they protect and improve water quality on a small scale, on a local level,” Brent said, “that those larger issues like the Chesapeake Bay watershed would be solved.”