(no subject)

[furrbear]

Actually heat your house with cow manure

There is now a facility called Huckabay Ridge, in Stephenville, Texas operating at capacity and selling pipeline-quality methane from cow manure.  Operating on the output of about 10k cows, they expect to generate 635,000 MMBtus of RNG(R) per year -- the equivalent of over 4.6 million gallons of heating oil, or about 460 gallons of heating oil/cow/year.  Folks in the blog discussion over there estimate that if we could do this with all the cows in the country, we'd cover just over 5% of our current energy needs.

They're already doing this in Iowa with pigs. If that methane were allowed to enter the atmosphere, it is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the same mass of CO₂. Of course when you burn methane it combines with oxygen to produce as much CO₂ as the original methane (CH₄+2O₂ → CO₂+2H₂O ). But the net greenhouse effect of the livestock is reduced by quite a large factor.

West Texas is also becoming the home of large windmill farms. The ones in Roscoe, Texas, are estimated to produce 800 MW, enough for 260,000 homes.

ObIrony: This is occurring at the same time as "Gov. GoodHair" and cronies want to construct 24 new coal-fired electricy plants.

Comments

[bearnight.livejournal.com]

Everything is old is new again. My father grew up on a farm and they'd pile manure against the base of the to help heat it in the winter. I'm sure this is a little cleaner.

[hickbear.livejournal.com]

"Gov. GoodHair"

*Sigh*. I miss Molly. :-{{{{

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

And of course they don't want any of those Commie Pinko emissions scrubbers on 'em, to capture all the mercury and other pollutants (aside from carbon dioxide) that coal plants spew across the landscape.