Cow power takes to the highways (biogas, California)

[jpak]

http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=11119

If the air horn on that bright red Hilarides Dairy tractor-trailer rig sounds a bit like a bleating cow, there may be more than your imagination at work.

Lindsay dairy farmer Rob Hilarides has completed a manure-to-gas project that lets him run two trucks on clean-burning bio-methane.

A $600,000 grant from the California Air Resources Board’s Alternative Fuel Incentive Program helped the Central Valley dairy farmer pay for the project that takes manure from his 10,000 cows, flushes it into huge, covered, lagoon for an anaerobic digestion process and then taps the methane given off by the decomposition process.

“It’s energy projects like this that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and get us off our dependency of foreign oil,” says Air Resources Board Chairman Mary Nichols. “It also addresses sources of long term air and water pollution problems.”

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[kestrel91316]

1. When all the methane had been digested out of the manure,

the remaining sludge makes a REALLY fabulous organic fertilizer, too. It's like pond muck, which has kept China fed for millennia.

[thereismore]

2. If we could trap the gas that goes out the cows' rear end, that would be fantastic.

This is great too. Does it work on pig feces too?