new natural gas plant in Huckaby

[CitizenKate]

Check out this article from chron.com about a new natural gas plant in Huckaby, Texas that turns cow manure and discarded cooking oil from restaurants into useful energy in the form of natural gas. Pretty amazing...

Who knows? Might just give PITA something else to focus on besides the leather industry, eh?

Kate

Edited November 8, 2007 by CitizenKate

[Johanna]

Hmmm...I think it's PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), but they are PITAS!!

Johanna

(ugh, what a job these guys have!)

[CitizenKate]

Um, yeah... it's great that they found a way to turn waste into energy, but it sure would suck to have to work there.

Kate

[TexasJack]

Lots of things are 'recycled' into energy. I did some work on a wood chip and sawdust fired power plant in Maine. Lots of lumber and paper mills there and they generate a lot of bark, chips, and sawdust. A modern facility with good pollution controls can burn that stuff up just fine. Quite a few odd hydrocarbons (off-spec paint, for example) get blended into No. 6 oil for power plants or cement kilns.

Oddly enough, trash is hard to burn for energy and most places that tried it failed miserably. It's too inconsistent unless it is pre-processed. Monday's trash will have far more grass and leaves than other days of the week. There's an interesting method that separates trash into different components - recovering glass and metals while compiling all the paper, wood, etc. for combustion. Someone tried to build a plant for that near Pittsburgh, but whiny locals shot it down.

Quite a few things - including used cooking oils and fats - can be compounded to make biodiesel. The stuff works pretty well and will clean out the carbon deposits that normal petroleum diesel leaves. Far better energy recovery than making ethanol.

[broncobuster]

PETA--PEOPLE EATING TASTY ANIMALS LOL could pass that. we had a county up here in wisconsin turn all there vehicles into biodeisel running vehicles. i use to run a restaurant we go through a lot of cooking oil. good recycling.

[Mike Phelps]

When a truck or bus rolls by fueled with that it smells like a feedlot, bacon and fries. NIVARNA.

Mike

[robert]

  CitizenKate said:

Check out this article from chron.com about a new natural gas plant in Huckaby, Texas that turns cow manure and discarded cooking oil from restaurants into useful energy in the form of natural gas. Pretty amazing...

Kate

Hey, I was actually at that ribbon cutting! Its a huge plant - very progressive. But... it still smells like cow manure... and they still have flies and dust... The wind was blowing hard that day, and the tents and all the bbq were downwind... I found myself trying to make sure I didn't lick my lips. ugg.

But its a neat plant - and will help the dairy guys around there. And provide energy and jobs... all good things. And they did it with almost no government help, which is a great thing since most renewable energy exists substantially on government subsidies and tax credits.

[CitizenKate]

Ugh... can't imagine wanting to eat with my nostrils filled with that smell. I'm surprised they didn't hand out respirators. But, also kind of hard to eat with a respirator on, eh?

But this does seem like a much better idea to me than, say, ethanol, which requires one form of useful energy to create another. I've read all the debates about whether it takes more or less energy to create the same amount of energy from ethanol. Don't know what to think of it, other than it gives corn farmers a new market.

Oh, and I missed where I typo'd the acronym - ha! Maybe it should be PITA after all - People Interested in Tea and Apples.

(... well, they are, aren't they, since they don't like animals?)

Kate