Engineer Hortensia Solís Agüero
Manager of Sustainable I+D Projects
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Telephone: (506) 25412828
Fax: (506) 25412728

Due to the reduction of reservoirs of hydroelectric plants, companies in the electric sector have been forced to generate electricity with fossil fuels. Add to this the increase in price of hydrocarbons, and you have the reason why electricity costs have increased in the last couple of years, which has affected negatively the production costs of coffee.

By means of this project, a gasifying system that functions with the biomass produced during the coffee process (pulp and husk) is planned to be built to produce fuel. This will work for generating electricity and also to assuage partially the electric needs of the cooperative.

The system will have the capacity of generating 25 kw of power for the cooperative, which has a capacity to produce an average of 7001 tons of broza (pulp) annually. If the pulp is not handled adequately, it will have a negative environmental impact, whether it is because of water contamination, bad odors, plagues and diseases in coffee producing communities.

The implementation of the gasifying system will substitute partially the cooperatives electric requirements by means of decreasing the electric bill by using the lignocellulosic waste from the milling process.

Considering that Coopedota is a company concerned about the environment, it poses the possibility of disposing its waste in a more efficient way that would promote the conservation of the environment in La Zona de los Santos.

The cooperative has been characterized for being a company of excellence in the national coffee sector, which has 787 active members, and a whole community dependent on its productive activity. Santa Maria is formed by 4274 inhabitants which is why any economic benefit that the cooperative might have will also benefit the community. This is because the gasifying technology will avoid  the investment in imported costly energetic resources, in order to decrease production costs and generate a greater wealth for the cooperative.   

It’s for this reason that the cooperative looks for constant innovation, renovation and creation of new clean technologies that are catalogued as low in cost and high productive output, to take full advantage of existing resources and the waste that coffee activity generates.