Got Milk Gas?

Last night I finished a fascinating book titled Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization, by W. Hodding Carter. In it, Mr. Carter not only writes how plumbers have changed history but that they have the ability to greatly help save our future. Simple technology in India is solving the horrendous problems of massive amounts of toxic and pathogenic excreta entering water supplies. Today as I'm working the polls and waiting for the mere less than 1% of my precinct's eligible voters to crawl from the woodwork and vote, I read in the Houston Chronicle where that has precisely started yesterday big time--in Texas!

The only difference is here in Texas, the waste products are from dairy cows, not humans.

Did you know the average dairy cow produces 15 gallons of manure per day? That's a lot of cow patties. It is certainly more in volume than the milk that is produced. In Erath County, Texas, where there are 52,000 dairy cows on any given day (not including the requisite bulls and calves) that equals a little over 3/4 of a million gallons of manure a day of which to safely dispose. I don't want to multiply that by 365 days of the year or think about how much urine accompanies all these millions of patties. Texas averages 335,000 dairy cows. Add to that the numbers of cattle for beef, breeding, tax exemptions, hobbies and investments (Longhorn, Oxen and Bison). When you consider the amount of waste produced in feed lots alone, it's a wonder any of our rivers, lakes and aquifers are of any use for human consumption. Not only are indigenous life in those waters upset, but incredible amounts of expensive chemicals are required to get that water in shape for use by humans or domestic animals.

A company named Environmental Power Corporation out of New Hampshire, takes manure from the dairy farmers in Erath County, adds some water and restaurant grease, then mixes in bacteria and lets the microbes feed on the mixture for weeks to create methane gas. The methane gas is then purified and piped off to the Lower Colorado River Authority where it is converted to electricity for about 10,000 homes in central Texas. Erath County dairy cows can produce the energy equivalent of 4.6 million gallons of oil annually.

The left-over mixture is a great, non-obnoxious fertilizer which can be used to grow corn and other plants to feed the dairy cows to make more manure to make more methane to............ it's a win/win for everybody and everything. Bottom line? No crap in the water system and almost free fuel. We're happy, dairy farmer's happy to get rid of his manure, fish and crawdads are happy, corn is happy, towns and cities are happy; let's have more of this. In Texas, we could practically have one of these plants in every county.

Let's encourage our state and national congressmen to make alternative fuel sources like these more accessible. Let's have more "trash to treasure" fuels. Write them. Call them. Email them. Need numbers and addresses?

League of Women Voters
713-784-2923
www.lwvhouston.org