There is wood in those Doritos.
Amid rollicking volatility in natural gas markets several years ago and against the background of burgeoning corporate concern about its environmental footprint, food and drink giant PepsiCo, owner of Frito-Lay, began reviewing its options for alternative fuels that could help it achieve several goals at once.
In addition to reducing its reliance on fuel delivered from established fossil sources and at risk of interruption, the company had crafted an ambitious target to reduce its overall use of water, natural gas and electricity.
It tries to do this while also keeping down transmission and transportation costs. PepsiCo draws a roughly 50-75 mile perimeter around a facility and then seeks to find the most suitable renewably sourced material.
Agriculture and food processing come with inherently substantial environmental footprints, but PepsiCo became increasingly aware of the potential cost savings as well as environmental benefits of a broad energy efficiency and use reduction program a little more than a decade ago, Frito-Lay senior director of environmental sustainability Al Halvorsen recently told Breaking Energy.
The company’s energy department has a number of projects in place to meet its energy program goals, including biomass, solar and landfill gas energy projects, though low natural gas prices in the past couple of years have sparked a review of the price advantages of widening use of renewable fuels, Halvorsen said. The price of natural gas has become a determinant for a number of energy projects, but in the right market the advantages of renewable fuel can outweigh the current price questions, Halvorsen said.
Frito-Lay’s Topeka Kansas plant burns municipal wood waste to fuel its fryers, taking wood and pallet remains that otherwise might have been landfilled to replace natural gas in its 60,000 lb/hour steam boilers.
Knock On Wood
The company partnered with a third party supplier to guarantee its access to wood supply, one of the major concerns for buyers of biomass fuel. The firm has had occasional weather-related transport interruptions, but none that have strained its roughly three days’ worth of onsite storage.
Because the company strives to find “locally-grown” sources of renewable energy, the Topeka plant came to use urban waste wood rather than the agricultural waste that might be more appropriate for a rural setting, Halvorsen said.
Original plans called for a fast rollout of a similar projects to between five and seven other facilities, but lower natural gas pricing in the past couple of years have changed the timing on those projects, Halvorsen said. The company is on track to meet its ambitious original 1999 goals of reducing its use of natural gas by 30%, and has until 2015 to meet its next round of natural gas reduction goals established using a 2006 baseline.
Biomass use in distributed generation and for combined heat and power use has been increasingly popular in the US in recent years, but concerns about how the Environmental Protection Agency will treat emissions from biomass projects has limited more widespread adoption of the fuel for electricity generation on a large scale. The fuel’s use is currently undergoing a lengthy scientific review by EPA to determine whether it will be forced to meet stricter emission standards.
