Students Assess Whether Food Waste Could Help Duke Achieve Carbon Neutrality

August 22, 2016

Bass Connections campus digester team members

Last fall, six Duke students assembled at Loyd Ray Farms, a project of the Duke Carbon Offsets Initiative (DCOI), to learn how its hogs, in the words of one student, Andrew Seelaus, “are cranking out some of North Carolina’s most valuable carbon offsets and renewable energy credits.”

Seelaus and the other five students—members of an energy-themed Bass Connections project partnering with the DCOI, the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, the Pratt School of Engineering, and the Nicholas School of the Environment—were out to learn whether an on-campus anaerobic digester could cost-effectively do for food waste what the digester at Loyd Ray Farms was doing for hog waste, thereby helping Duke meet its goal of carbon neutrality by 2024.

To answer that question, the students undertook a feasibility study with three components: a food waste audit at Duke; a survey of relevant federal, state, and university policies; and an economic modeling exercise, which was executed with guidance from team member Brian Murray, Environmental Economics Program director at the Nicholas Institute and interim director of the Duke Energy Initiative.

For Murray, just as important as the study’s main aim was its provision of an intense interdisciplinary energy education—one requiring students to calculate biogas yields and understand renewable energy credit markets.

“The learning curve was steep,” said Murray. “The students had to study the operating requirements of various types of commercial anaerobic digesters, determine whether the quality and quantity of our waste stream was suitable for one of them, and research policies that would limit the scenarios for the economic analysis.”

Read the full article on the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions website.

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