raisinbran20 asked
Along with milk, some dairy cows in California are providing another kind of juice — indirectly. At the Straus Family Creamery (search), an organic dairy farm north of San Francisco, manure from 270 Holstein and Jersey cows is being collected and deposited into a methane digester — a specially covered pond filled with natural bacteria that eats the manure and gives off methane gas. The methane, in turn, drives the power plant. 'It's piped into an engine that burns the methane as fuel and generates electricity,' said Albert Straus, who owns the creamery. It produces enough electricity to power the milking machines as well as the entire assembly line at the creamery, from the milk bottlers to the refrigerators. Straus figures the $280,000 system saves him $6,000 a month in energy costs. And turning waste into energy is half the story. The methane digester (search) is burning a greenhouse gas with 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. 'On most dairy farms, methane from manure would be released into the environment, but here the combustion destroys the methane, substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions,' said Allen Dusault, president of Sustainable Conservation (search). 'If we can get all the farms that produce manure to convert to methane digesters ... that can have a pretty substantial benefit.' With California state and federal agencies now willing to share some of the costs, methane digesters may soon become a trend as the search for renewable and reliable energy sources turns cow manure into a precious resource.
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