Poop Power: From Waste Pollutant to Power Source

Livestock manure from dairy farms, feedlots, poultry farms etc. has a tendency to leach into groundwater and overflow into streams and rivers. By capturing the manure and turning it into methane and other forms of energy, farmers and ranchers can eliminate the pollution and generate profits.

It takes slightly more than three gallons of liquid cow manure to create one kilowatt-hour of electricity.

A lot of poop. A small amount of electricity. A big environmental boost to a dairy farmer.

A fledgling anaerobic manure digester is now running at roughly 80 percent capacity near Rexville in southwestern Skagit County. The plant produced its first power on Aug. 30 and will host Gov. Chris Gregoire at a ceremony next Monday.

The digester accepts the liquid manure in a big holding tank, where it gives off methane gas that is then burned to produce electricity....

Washington already has three conventional poop-to-methane-to-power digesters near Lynden, Monroe and Sunnyside. However, they essentially accept manure from one dairy farm each. The Rexville operation -- built and run by Farm Power -- is different in a couple ways.

It is set up to accept manure from two or more dairy farms -- enabling smaller operations to participate.

And it is designed to accept and extract methane from icky, slop-like wastes from seafood and chicken processing -- as well as other food wastes. Farm Power had to get a bill passed in the Legislature this past spring to make combining the food and cattle wastes easier from a regulatory aspect.

Dairy farms produce huge amounts of manure that can ooze into groundwater and eventually into streams and rivers to cause pollution problems.

Farmers take many measures to deal with this problem, but digesters are a more cost-efficient way to tackle the matter, said Daryl Maas, one of two brothers behind the Rexville operation. _Bioenergy

It takes time for people to learn to think in terms of solving problems profitably and productively. If people spend too much time attending to the mainstream (skank) media, they are more likely to run screaming from problems, in full panic. The same panic mentality applies to many psychological neotenates and academically lobotomised products of government education.

Still, there is hope. No one knows what the end result of new information sources will be, for global societies. People may learn to ignore the petty tyrants of local politics and education, and set their own course.