NATURAL POOP TO NATURAL GAS

Describing the opening day ceremonies during the which the plant was in full operation, the reporter mentioned in passing that there was only a faint odor of manure in the air. It’s really no joking matter. Putting biomass to work to create usable biogas means the waste matter is not left laying around or buried. Either way it produces greenhouse gases but using waste as a substitute for fossil fuel gases means essentially cutting emissions by half. Big savings.

And it adds value for the waste suppliers. They don’t make anything for delivering the waste to the plant for processing, but it saves them the expense of getting rid of it. They are allowed to deliver to the plant at no charge. This resolves conditions that led to a federal lawsuit against local dairies to stop Lake Waco-polluting runoff into the Bosque River.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples: "Today these two sectors of our economy join together for something very special…Today is a real winning solution for agriculture, for our environment, for our state's economy and for new sources of energy."

Texas Plant Uses Dairy Waste To Make Natural Gas
Angela K. Brown, November 6, 2007 (AP via Yahoo Finance)

WHO
Microgy Inc., subsidiary of Environmental Power Corp. (Richard Kessel, president/CEO); The Lower Colorado River Authority; Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E)

Schematic of the process and the emissions savings from it. (click to enlarge)

WHAT
Huckabay Ridge, an animal waste-to-natural gas facility, is now up and running. It uses grease from local restaurants to process manure from local dairy farms into natural gas for homes.

WHEN
- Huckabay Ridge is presently selling its gas to the Lower Colorado River Authority.
- It will begin selling to PG&E in Summer 2008.
- Opening ceremonies were November 5.

WHERE
- Micrology’s Huckabay Ridge is in Huckabay, Texas, near Stephenville in rural Erath County. Environmental Power Corp., the parent company, is based in Portsmouth, N.H.
The Lower Colorado River Authority sends the Huckabay Ridge gas to homes in Central Texas.
- PG&E is based in San Francisco, Ca.

WHY
- Texas has 335,000 cows. Erath County has 52,000 cows. Each cow produces 15 gallons of manure/day.
- Using a modern Environmental Power Corp. “digester,” Huckabay Ridge, a former compost site, is expected to produce natural gas for 11,000 homes every year.
The plant processes 10 truckloads of manure daily.
- The trucks drive up a dried-manure ramp and dump into a small tank where water is added. The mix flows into and is swirled in a million-gallon slurry tank. It is then mixed with used restaurant grease in a 900,000 gallon digester tank where bacteria feed on it for weeks, turning it into methane gas. After purifying, the gas is piped to consumers.

Methane digesters at Huckabay Ridge. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- Kessel: "The beauty is that you take the waste products and you create a useful form of energy…We look at these as non-depleting gas wells with a long-term supply of renewable energy."
- Sid Miller, R-Stephenville, Texas state official: "This is a turning point in agriculture…Agriculture is no longer just food and fiber; it is now food and fiber and fuel…Agriculture is going to responsible for producing a large percent of the world's fuel."
- John Traweek, operator, 45-year-ol family-run Jam Dot Dairy: "It's a great thing for everybody…"