Poop Power Could Be Next Energy Frontier
By Tom Banse
OPB News
October 12, 2006
RUPERT, ID — Dairy cow manure could be the next frontier of alternative energy in the Northwest. Lord knows, there’s plenty of it around here. Machinery called a “digester” can turn poop into power.
This fall, the biggest digesters built to date in Washington and Idaho go online. Correspondent Tom Banse reports from south-central Idaho.
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Welcome to the Magic Valley Gas Field. “Gas field?” You say. There’s not a single natural gas well in Idaho. Yes, that’s true. But there are plenty of cows.
Wayne Tolman: “What we’re trying to do is develop an above-ground natural gas well. And our feedstock is the dairy industry.”
Wayne Tolman manages a multi-million dollar plant that converts excrement to energy. It’s located on a big dairy near the town of Rupert.
His job is not for the squeamish. Every day, the “honey wagon,” as he calls it, brings him the poop scraped up from behind 5000 milking cows.
Wayne Tolman: “This is the mouth of the digester. This is how it’s going to get into the stomach.”
Tolman compares the surrounding tangle of pipes, tanks, and kettles to an oversize version of a human stomach. Liquefied manure bubbles away at body temperature for about four and half days.
Wayne Tolman: “Not to be crude, you know everybody passes gas a little bit. It’s methane. It has natural gas in it. So there you go.”
Tolman opens a nozzle valve coming off one of the tanks. He lights a hot, blue flame.
Wayne Tolman: “What you’re hearing here is a raw methane flame burning.”
Some dairies use that heat to generate electricity for the grid.
Tolman’s company, Intrepid Technology and Resources, is taking a different approach. It will pump purified biogas straight into the regional natural gas pipeline.
By answering the call of nature, these docile Holstein cows can eventually take credit for heating around 5,000 homes.
Steve Whiteside: “We going to take a product in manure that was hard to deal with and pull some economic value out of it. That’s a big plus all the way around.”
Steve Whitesides owns the dairy where Intrepid built its prototype plant. He was happy to lease them some land.
They’ll take all his messy manure and give him back valuable by-products. He gets free compost that can be used for bedding. He gets liquid fertilizer. There’s less odor.
Steve Whiteside: “And a cleaner environment that we’re dealing with, too.”
With that kind of payoff, you might ask why every dairy doesn’t put in a digester. This is the only one in operation in Idaho. There’s one other under construction. Same for Washington. Oregon has two.
Steve Whitesides: “We’re still at the wait-and-see type of deal. We’re just getting over that hump. Let’s see it work first before we put this kind of money into the system.”
Chad Kruger of Washington State University says there are cheaper ways to generate renewable energy.
Chad Kruger: “If we look at digesters as an energy technology or electricity technology, it is not cost competitive. That’s one of the things that we try to get people noy to look at in that way. They are a carbon and nutrient management technology.”
Government and academia are spending big to make manure-to-methane work better.
The Port of Tillamook Bay has collected $1.7 million in federal start up funding for a centralized manure digester.
The State of Washington recently loaned nearly $2 million to finish a poop-to-power facility on a dairy near Sunnyside.
On the web:
Intrepid Technology and Resources, Inc.
Port of Tillamook Bay methane digester
© Copyright 2006, KUOW
Posted by: Paul on October 15, 2006 at 12:43:04