Ranchers turning cow manure into kilowatt-hours

For the past four years, Snohomish County Black Angus rancher and tree farmer Dale Reiner has tried to make power from poop.

After countless hours chatting up dairymen, negotiating power prices with the local utility and lining up grants to support a project that could turn manure into kilowatts, he's getting close. But it's been a challenge making cow power pencil out.

"The price of our power here is so cheap," Reiner said. "We can't compete."

That could change.

Beginning in 2012, the state's largest utilities will have to get 3 percent of their power from renewable sources. By 2020, voter-approved Initiative 937 requires renewable energy to make up 15 percent of overall power.

That includes biomass energy that's created when organic material rots or is burned to make electricity. It's typically fueled by waste products: sewage and cow manure, logging trims and agricultural leftovers such as grape skins from winemaking. It also stops the methane created by decaying waste from escaping to the atmosphere and warming the planet; it captures the gas and burns it.

Biomass plants already are fired up around the state.

The King County sewage treatment plant in Renton is trapping methane from sewage to power fuel cells. It's a first-of-its-kind project that could be duplicated at plants nationwide.

At a landfill in Klickitat County, gas from rotting trash is made into power.

And scraps from lumber and pulp-and-paper plants fuel the state's largest biomass facilities, burning bark, sawdust and scrap wood for energy.

That could be just the start.

If you took all of the barnyard manure, fibrous ends of asparagus, restaurant grease, chicken feathers and logging debris -- all of the state's organic waste -- and turned it into energy, you could heat and light half the state's homes.

But that won't happen.

It costs too much to haul leftover wood and vegetables to a centralized power plant. And some of it already is being put to good use, such as compressing wood waste into particleboard.

When you look at the total energy supply and the contribution of biomass projects, "none of these things amount to a hill of beans," said Jeff King, senior resource analyst with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, an advisory agency. They're "moderate in number, but small in size."

Experts expect to see the most growth with manure projects such as Reiner's.

"If that single farm can heat 15 to 20 homes in electricity in a whole year, in a large scale it might not mean anything," said Craig Frear, lead author of a Washington State University study that tallied up the potential for biomass energy. "But in a small scale, it does."

Reiner's project, Qualco Energy, is a non-profit partnership with the Sno/Sky Agricultural Alliance, the Tulalip Tribes and Northwest Chinook Recovery, who like its benefits for salmon. Dairy farmers traditionally use the manure that fills up their feedlots to fertilize fields, but sometimes too much is applied, polluting streams. The power project could prevent that.

While the effort serves lofty goals to slow global warming, Reiner's motivation is simpler.

He wants to keep farmers farming.

Dairies have been losing money for a decade. More than 40 percent of Washington's dairies have shut down. Selling manure could keep a farmer on the financial edge afloat.

"The only way to save farmland is to make it so valuable that farmers don't want to sell it," said Reiner, whose great-grandfather homesteaded the area in 1873.

That may mean cashing in on cow waste.