furrbear | (no subject)

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.