Heinz Potato Peel Project Shows How Energy Crisis Could Pay a Big Unexpected Dividend for Every Investor
Submitted by EnergyTechStocks.com
It was just a paragraph buried in a press release issued by H.J Heinz Co. – a paragraph about, of all things, potato peels. But looked at closely, this one paragraph gives investors the key for quite possibly making a small fortune by understanding the new role of “garbage” on this energy-scarce planet.
With global population headed toward nine billion by 2050, approximately 50% more than today, the need for clean-burning natural gas has been and will continue to soar. Despite the growing role of liquefied natural gas (LNG), natural gas shortages in the U.S. and elsewhere are expected to develop. Enter “biogas,” which is gas made from decomposing organic garbage – sewage, animal waste, etc.
Buried in its May 27, 2008 press release, Heinz announced that it is developing a project in the U.S. state of Oregon to convert potato peels into enough biogas to heat 4,000 Oregon homes for a winter. Think about this for a moment. Heinz, the ketchup company, is becoming a gas producer. Not in the 20th century sense of drilling wells, but in the 21st century sense of converting garbage into energy gold.
What Heinz is doing eventually every other food company will probably do as well, opening up a vast new revenue stream for one of the world’s biggest industries. What the food industry can do, so too can the garbage industry, just by segregating organic from inorganic waste. Landfills around the world already are starting to be mined for the biogas trapped beneath the ground in pockets of decaying waste.
As EnergyTechStocks.com has reported, Rafael Coven, managing partner of Cleantech Indices LLC, sees biogas as an extraordinary growth opportunity. Concentrating on companies that build plants for converting waste into biogas, Coven told EnergyTechStocks.com about six months ago that investors should keep an eye on two German companies, Schmack and EnviTec Biogas. (For more see Cleantech Indices’ Rafael Coven: Biogas could be a ‘Fantastic’ Opportunity for Investors -Part 2 of 4)
But all an investor really has to do to possibly make money from biogas is to check which food companies are following Heinz’ example and getting into the biogas game. All could be winners.
