Last week, while thousands of farmers and others involved in the agricultural industry attended World Ag Expo in Tulare, a much smaller group visited the Calgren Renewable Fuels plant in Pixley.
Only they weren’t there to see how the plant makes ethanol. Instead, the group of dairy operators, county officials and business people were there to see the new energy plant Calgren recently built alongside its ethanol building.
Specifically, the company built an anaerobic digester, a facility that processes cow manure supplied by a nearby dairy into “biogas” – mostly methane. The gases fuel a generator turbine that creates heat necessary in the plant’s primary task of converting corn and sorghum into the gasoline additive, ethanol.
It’s one of only two or three digesters operating in Tulare County, all producing biogas as an alternative to natural gas fueling generators on dairies, farms and at the Calgren plant. But experts involved in developing and building anaerobic digesters said that more of these facilities are likely to be built in California, the top dairy-producing state in the U.S. And with Tulare County being the top dairy county in the country – lots of cows and bulls producing lots of manure – it seems likely many of the digesters will be built here and other parts of the South Valley.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2012 Census of Agriculture, the latest data available, listed more than 1.08 million commercial cattle and calves in Tulare County, more than in any other county in the country.
Fueling the prospects for more digesters here is that in September 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1122 – the “Bioenergy Feed-in Tariff” – creating requirements that each of California’s three major electrical utilities must procure 250 megawatts of electricity from renewable energy sources originating from biogas processed from wastewater, food waste, manure and forest waste.
http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/story/news/local/2015/02/19/cow-manure-goldmine/23707425/