Dec 27 - Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, Texas)

Texans have always had a strange affinity for cow patties. They've been bronzed for trophies. They've been tossed for sport. And they've been used, however crudely, for art.

Now, cow manure is about to be used to power homes and businesses in Central and North Texas.

A Colorado company is building a $10 million plant near Stephenville, about 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth, that will extract millions of cubic feet of pipeline-ready natural gas from cow manure every day.

They call it biogas, and it certainly ranks as one of the most creative alternative sources of energy.

"We've got waste materials here that have a lot of energy, and it seems a shame not to capture as much of that as we can," said Cady Engler, a biological and agricultural engineer at Texas A&M University who has followed the biogas trend.

The Lower Colorado River Authority in Austin has agreed to buy the natural gas generated at the plant _ enough to power 6,000 homes _ when it becomes fully operational in April, said Ingmar Sterzing, the river authority's fuels manager.

The biogas will be used to help power the river authority's three natural gas power plants, although it will only provide a fraction of the energy needed.

Still, officials at Microgy Inc., the Golden, Colo.-based renewable natural gas company building the plant near Stephenville, are focused on the technology's potential. They want to build more manure-processing plants in Texas.

"If we could exploit all the cows in Texas, it could be that a significant percentage of the energy used could be generated from renewable sources," said Dan Eastman, senior vice president of business development at Microgy.

Using cow patties for fuel is not some pie-in-the-sky notion.

Animal waste has been used for cooking and heating fuel for years in developing countries. In Europe, and especially Germany, there are thousands of processing plants turning animal waste into energy.

Only a handful of plants are in operation in the United States.

But as concerns grow about pollution from coal-fired power plants and the country's dependence on foreign oil, alternative energy is starting to catch on. Microgy's parent company, Portsmouth, N.H.-based Environmental Power Corp., already has three other plants in operation in Wisconsin, and the company is planning to build more than 20 in California, Eastman said.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has awarded millions of dollars in grants to study the issue, including one last summer that will allow the University of Georgia to study converting poultry litter into fuel. And the Department of Defense is spending millions in search of alternative fuel sources to power military vehicles. One possibility: converting trash into gasoline.

But even proponents of using animal waste for energy say the technology might never produce enough to meet more than a fraction of the state's energy needs.

"The technology is going to be a part of the solution, but certainly not necessarily a huge part of it," Engler said.

Still, clean-air advocates love the idea.

"There are lots of renewable resources, such as biogas, that can produce electricity 24 hours a day and seven days a week with less pollution," said Tom "Smitty" Smith, director of the Texas chapter of Public Citizen in Austin.

Texans apparently like the idea, too. A recent poll conducted by the advocacy group Environmental Integrity Project reported that most respondents said they prefer energy conservation and alternative energy over building new coal-fired power plants.

Officials with the Lower Colorado River Authority have emphasized the environmentally friendly aspects of the project. And they love the fact that with cow dung, they've got a steady and consistent source of material.

There are more than 13 million head of cattle in Texas. The average dairy cow produces more than a ton of manure a year.

"If you look at wind energy, and even solar, the difficulty with those forms is that they're dependent on the fuel supply," said Sterzing, the river authority fuels manager. "The wind, for example _ you only get that energy when the wind blows. They have their limitations in regards to when they're available."

There are no such concerns with the biogas plant near Stephenville. In the center of town is a fiberglass Holstein cow statue called Moo-La, which proclaims Erath County the "No. 1 Dairy County in Texas."

The Stephenville manure processing plant will be located next to a composting site that receives manure from 20,000 head of cattle.

"The United States is starting to look at its biomass resources as an energy source," Eastman said, "rather than as a waste stream."

___

HOW IT WORKS

A Colorado company is building a $10 million plant near Stephenville to convert cow manure into natural gas.

The processing plant will consist of eight large tanks similar to grain silos that can process manure from up to 10,000 cows a day.

The manure will be heated inside the 916,000-gallon tanks in an oxygen-free environment, where bacteria will break down the organic material. As the manure decomposes, it releases methane-rich gas, which is captured, refined slightly and then sent directly to the state's elaborate grid of underground natural gas pipelines.

The plant is located next to Producers Compost Inc., a composting site that receives manure from 20,000 cows.

Sources: Environmental Power Corp.; Lower Colorado River Authority

___

(c) 2006, Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Visit the Star-Telegram on the World Wide Web at http://www.star-telegram.com.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.