COW MANURE - As a power source

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Monday | June 25, 2001

Bovine intervention: Farmer's plant turns cow manure into power source

06/25/2001

By Jo Sandin / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

WRIGHTSTOWN, Wis. – Dairyman Carl Theunis can lay claim to the state's most productive herd – each of his Holsteins generates 26,000 pounds of milk, 9,855 pounds of manure and 417 watts of electricity a year.

After years of planning, borrowing and building, Carl and Sharon Theunis watched Gov. Scott McCallum flip the switch last week that made their family farm into Wisconsin's first cow-powered electric plant.

Here's how it works:

The 1,800 Holsteins – feeding, ambling around and lying down in the four curtain-walled barns at Tinedale Farm – produce 48,600 pounds of manure every day.

Instead of being spread on Tinedale's 4,000 acres of cropland, the waste is loaded into a huge on-site chamber, where it is digested by anaerobic bacteria at two temperatures.

The result is 300,000 cubic feet of methane gas, collected at the top of the chamber and piped to an on-site electric generator, where it is burned. The burned methane produces a constant flow of 750 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power 250 houses.

Wisconsin Electric Power Co. will buy the electricity, while solid and liquid byproducts of the process can be spread as pathogen-free fertilizer.

Mr. Theunis is planning for the next step. When he can afford it, he will add treatment centers to clarify the liquid byproduct for reuse as water.

But visitors to Mr. Thenius' farm found turning manure into electricity impressive enough. He couldn't have stirred up much more hoo-ha if he had found a way to take calories out of ice cream.

To a crowd of several hundred visitors gathered for the plant's debut, the governor said, "This technology has the potential to help transform rural economies and is a stellar example of how we can find innovative solutions here in Wisconsin."

The Theunis family received a $400,000 low-cost loan from the state Commerce Department and a $100,000 county grant to finance the digester. According to calculations by Wisconsin Electric, if all the cow manure in the state were collected and processed in manure digesters, the resulting methane could produce 750 megawatts of electricity, 1,000 times as much as the Tinedale plant.

To the Iowa State University researchers who developed the process, the proper term is "manure management by temperature-phased anaerobic digestion."

Mr. Theunis, however, sees the technology as a just-in-time idea capable of transforming many negatives about his beloved dairy industry into positives.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Answers

I read somewhere a while ago, a normal healthy horse expells 30-50 lbs of manure a day...... I have 3 horses here, I clean several times a day..... Sure wish I could make $$$ with this!!! the good thing about horse manure, if you work it up, turn it over and let it "cook" a yr..it is good compost....it also helps reseed a lawn!

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

SAR, horse manure was used as fertilizer on English farms for years, probly still is on the smaller ones. It smells good and healthy to me because I always associate it with green fields and healthy veggies. You're right, it has to compost a while to kill the weed seeds, otherwise, as you say, you can reseed a lawn with it!

If you ever have too much, I daresay a "free horse manure" sign out front will get rid of all your excess! Or maybe you could sell it. It's worth a try. You could use those 5-gallon buckets as a measure. . .

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001


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