Making manure green

Not by feeding too much alfalfa.

Dairy cows are big energy users, but a Texas AgriLife researcher will present a paper at the Texas Animal Manure Management Issues forum in Austin that shows they can pay their energy bills and more.

I’m not sure what will be more fun, barhopping on Sixth Street or the conference.

But I digress. Cady Engler, the researcher, looked at electrical, diesel, gasoline and natural gas usage on dairies for milking, waste management, feeding and watering. He didn’t include the energy to grow crops for feed or transporting the milk to market.

He found a wide variation in usage from one type of dairy to another, but the average was about 3.2 kilowatt hours per day per cow.

Turning manure into energy, either with bacteria to make methane or high heat to make hydrogen or both could make up to 25 kilowatt hours per day per cow.

The processes can not only make energy, in the form of heat or electricity, but also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the manure. They also reduce the volume of “nutrients” left to be disposed of. In ag researcher talk that means there’s less poop to spread on farm fields - up to 80 percent less.

And in places where it rains (that leaves most of the Panhandle out) and there's hills (out again) that would mean less threat of said "nutrients" ending up in a creek, then a river, then a lake, then your house. But you already got that.

A fresh breeze

We're still waiting for someone to plug us into the rest of Texas with transmission lines, but local students got the benefit of wind power Saturday even before the big construction push starts.

Cielo Wind Power, of Austin, held its annual Earth Day Wind Ball in Vega on April 13 and awarded scholarships to students from around the area. To qualify, students wrote an essay about being stewards of the Earth and how they will continue to pursue that role.

Panhandle scholarship recipients include Shelley Fangman of Vega High School, Anna Rebecca Johnson of Adrian High School, Amelia Taylor of Clarendon High School, Trent Daniel Britten of Groom High School, Skyler Michele Conatser of Hedley High School, Chase Bohler of McLean School, Keslie Satterwhite of Panhandle High School and Tim Poland and Thomas Rapstine of White Deer High School.

Rory Schepisi, owner of Boot Hill Saloon in Vega and a former finalist on Next Food Network Star, provided a suitably Earth-friendly meal of organic beef tenderloin, and guests picked up ponderosa pine seedlings to plant. (Never discount a free tree in the Panhandle.)

Cielo is a privately held company that develops, owns and operates wind power facilities in the Southwest. Its latest local venture was the Wildorado Wind Ranch, right on the way to Vega from Amarillo. It sold a large interest in the venture to Edison Mission, of California, but the companies are working on the second phase that should stretch from Wildorado to just over the Potter County line along the Canadian River Breaks.

From The Ground Up

An intimate relationship

It takes a lot of water to keep electric generation going and and a good bit of power to move and treat water.

The University of Texas and the Environmental Defense Fund released a report today that will tell you how all of that works. It's a hefty read at 56 pages, but when you consider Texas power plants use 157 million gallons of water every year, enough for the home use of 3 million people per year, it's an important read.

Power plants heat water into steam to turn turbines and more water to cool down and condense the steam back into water for reuse. On the other side of the equation, getting water out of the ground, moving it to consumers and treating the resulting wastewater takes electricity.

The upshot is improving water conservation reduces power use and improving energy efficiency reduces water needs.

The report may give you more details than you really want in its 56 pages, but there are some eye openers. For example, it says average U.S. indoor residential water use breaks down to 31 percent for toilets and 25 percent for clothes washers, the two top categories of usage. Conservation costs money sometimes, but putting a bladder or brick in your toilet tank is cheap.

Look out the window for where the real savings can happen. The report says usage for your yard and such averages about 58 percent of all residential use.

The report, the first in a series, may make you wonder sometimes with phrases like "cross-sectional vulnerability," but it's pretty educational. Just hope policy makers pay attention so you're not the only one making good decisions about water and power use.