Hog waste to energy: a new pilot project
I don’t remember when I first read about the potential for using manure from hogs, cattle, chickens, etc. to generate electricity, but it was much longer ago than I ever started bookmarking the articles. Now, Duke University and Duke Energy (both founded about a hundred years ago by James Buchanan Duke) have constructed a pilot program on a North-Carolina hog farm that captures methane from the manure and burns it to run a turbine. From 9000 hogs, it makes enough electricity to power 30 homes for a year and prevents release of as much CO2 into the atmosphere as taking 900 cars off the road–5000 metric tons.
As a kid growing up in northwestern Ohio, I listened to WJR radio in Detroit every morning, and it had a brief show for farmers. It’s host used to say things like, “Ah, smell that fresh dairy air.” It sounded like “derrière,” and to a townie, riding past the dairy farms on a warm day smelled much more like a derrière than fresh air! Since then, farms have only gotten larger. Too many of them–I think it must be nearly all of them–simply push the manure into open lagoons. They stink, of course, with numerous environmental consequences.
For one thing, the methane open hog lagoons generate is 21 times as potent a greenhouse gas, pound for pound, as CO2. Remember, the annual waste from 9000 hogs produces the equivalent CO2 as 900 cars, and the cars do not also spew methane.
