Many in the agriculture community and alternative energy community have been hopeful that methane could one day be trapped from cow manure and used as a local energy source on farms across America. According to Liz Welter’s article for the Wisconsin Rapids Tribune online, Tom Drendel, former superintendent of the Marshfield University of Wisconsin Agriculture Research Station, shares this hope.This is why Drendel and other community leaders are working to establish a Rural Energy Education Center at the agriculture station’s dairy farm in McMillan, Wisconsin. Welter writes that under the right conditions farms could one day produce solar, wind, and geothermal energy on site. Since there is so much potential, different energy sources that could be on a farm, Drendel is motivated to increase the research and demonstration projects at the station where he is still a researcher.
However, Welter reports that roughly $3 million is needed to establish and properly equip the center. One piece of equipment needed is a “prototype methane digester designed for the average dairy farm of about 100 cows,” said Scott Larson, executive director of the Marshfield Area Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MACCI). Larson says that developing the digester was the idea of the MACCI energy subcommittee.
The 2010 federal budget contains $500,000 for an ongoing project where a laboratory model that was developed by a Milwaukee engineering firm is currently being tested by the University of Wisconsin. Drendel says that Mullins Dairy neighbors the agriculture farm “and is interested in piping the methane produced for energy.”
‘“What's unique about digesters is that any organic matter can digest into methane gas. So the dairy's waste stream could come back to us, we could digest it and then it would go back to them as methane. There are so many possibilities to reduce waste and generate energy. But we need a center like this to demonstrate how to do it,’ Drendel said.”
Whether Drendel’s project will get up and running and whether or not methane will one day be an energy source used on farms across the nation remains to be seen, but with an alternative energy bill and climate bill still being debated in Congress there is room for hope that both could happen.
To read the Welter article click here.
Posted: 10/30/09
