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MILFORD — An energy company has found a way to generate electricity for thousands of Utah homes with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy: pig manure. Also, the company claims its project actually destroys greenhouse gasses.
Circle Four Farms, located outside Milford, has about 75,000 sows and sends more than 1 million hogs to market every year. That feeds a lot of people but it also creates tons of waste.
That's why Alpental Energy approached Circle Four about generating electricity from the manure, while cutting back on odor.
“They get to produce power and we get to utilize our finishing manure to produce power and reduce our green house,” said Jim Webb, director of environmental, public affairs and safety for Circle Four.
Webb showed KSL how it works: Every day, pumps send 800,000 gallons of waste through a pipeline to a facility where it first gets treated in what's called an anaerobic digester. Underneath the cover, bacteria are at work creating methane gas.
“The bacteria get really happy,” explained Paul Stephan, a managing partner at Alpental Energy. “It’s kept at a certain temperature.”
He said instead of letting harmful methane gas vent into the atmosphere, Alpental uses it for fuel.
“We take and collect that methane gas, take it off the anaerobic digester, vacuum it off, really,” he said, “compress, condition it, and put it into engines.”
“We then burn the methane gas and turn the generator that produces the power,” he added.
Those generators produce 3.2 megawatts of energy that goes straight onto the power grid. That's enough to power 3,000 Utah homes for a year.
Additionally, Stephan said there's a definite positive impact on air quality.
“We reduce the equivalent of 100,000 tons of CO2 annually,” he said.
That's like taking 20,800 cars off the road every year.
If there's such a thing as finding beauty in pig manure, it might be this — it's an uninterruptible power supply. The hogs produce it 24/7, regardless of weather.
“It’s not just when the wind blows or not just when the sun shines,” Webb pointed out. “It’s all day long.”
Stephan said there is economic benefit for the utility buying the manure-created power and its consumers. Since the process does not depend on the cost of oil or some other variable fuel, Alpental locks in its power prices for years, even over a decade.
