ELECTRICITY TO BE MADE FROM WASTE; PLANT'S METHANE WILL BE CONVERTED TO POWER.

Byline: Kevin F. Sherry Daily News Staff Writer

The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District is working on a first-in-the-state project that would produce electricity from human waste.

With the help of Camarillo-based Energy 2000 Inc., the district plans to combine the methane gas produced during the treatment of the waste with chemicals in a fuel cell to create enough electrical current to power its Rancho Las Virgenes Composting Facility.

``We're making beneficial use of methane that we would otherwise burn off,'' said Carlos Reyes, associate engineer for the water district.

Every day the treatment plant produces 100,000 to 120,000 cubic feet of methane gas from its anaerobic digesters - large tanks that use bacteria to digest solid human waste.

Every day 65,000 to 70,000 pounds of sludge passes through the facility, which processes waste from residents of Agoura Hills, Westlake Village, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Oak Park and parts of eastern Ventura County.

The excess gas produced in the treatment gets burned off into the atmosphere as heat and water vapor.

With the new project, the gas will be routed instead into two giant 200-kilowatt fuel cells. There the gas will react with the chemicals in the fuel cell and produce an electrical charge.

``The methane is completely utilized for its electronic content,'' said Tom Nielsen, president of Energy 2000. ``It's good for them and good for the environment.''

The lack of harmful emissions makes the project especially appealing, Reyes said.

``It's all clean,'' he said.

The fuel cells burn so cleanly that they do not even require a permit from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

The only byproducts remaining will be water vapor and heat. Instead of being released into the atmosphere, that heat will be recycled back to the digesters, to keep the bacteria at a happy 95-degree temperature.

The infrastructure of the plant has pipes and conduits that were supposed to use the methane to fuel an internal combustion engine, but the district was never able to obtain the necessary air-quality permits, Reyes said. The new fuel cells will simply tap into the same pipes, but without the air pollution problems.

The two 40,000-pound fuel cells are 18 feet long, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide. They are being assembled and tested in Connecticut. If all goes as planned, ``we're supposed to be making power by April '99,'' Reyes said.

Depending on how much methane is produced and electricity saved, the $2.6 million program should pay for itself in five to 10 years, Nielsen said.

The technology on which the power generation is based has been around for years and is widely used in aerospace applications like the space shuttle and the international space station.

The Las Virgenes district will be the first in California to use methane gas from human waste treatment as fuel for the cell.