Texas houses largest manure-to-power plant

STEPHENVILLE, Texas, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- A Texas plant is the largest manure-to-energy operation in the United States.

Tractor-trailers drop off about 20 tons of manure 10 times a day to the Microgy Inc. plant, where it's mixed and processed to produce natural gas.

The Huckabay Ridge plant houses eight silos that hold more than 900,000 gallons each in an area of Texas that is home to 52,000 dairy cows, according to a report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The $18.5 million facility has the capacity to produce enough natural gas to power about 11,000 homes, said Mike Hvisdos, executive vice president of Microgy, a subsidiary of New Hampshire-based Environmental Power Corp.

At Huckabay Ridge, dry manure is collected from nearby dairy farmers and mixed with water. The liquid is dumped into a million-gallon basin and then pumped into digesters where other waste and bacteria break the manure down to methane.

The byproduct, a dried compost, is sold to the Texas Department of Transportation.

There are other facilities in the country that turn manure into methane, but most are smaller and used to power on-site generators, said Rich Kessel, president of Environmental Power.

Huckabay Ridge gas goes into a natural gas pipeline along with conventional gas from wells in the Barnett Shale and elsewhere.

In addition to helping dairy farmers get rid of the 141 pounds of manure produced each day by the average cow, the company has developed a fairly new source of energy that doesn't emit as much carbon dioxide.