Cow power helps fill your gas tank

Cows help you fill your cereal bowl, bake your cake and adorn your pizza. Now right here in Tulare County — cows will help you fill your gas tank.

Calgren Renewable Fuels, the Pixley-based ethanol plant, has been awarded a $4.68 million matching grant from the California Energy Commission (CEC) to utilize dairy cow gas to make ethanol.

The money will go to construction of a digester used to break down manure to make clean burning biomethane — the green equivalent of natural gas.

“This will mean we can further reduce our carbon footprint in making ethanol,” said Calgren CEO Lyle Schlyer.

Currently the Highway 99 biofuel plant is the only operating ethanol production plant in the state. Ethanol is blended with gasoline at 10 percent in California.

Schlyer says it is increasingly important to produce the motor fuel with fewer carbon emissions. Already, Calgren uses waste heat from a cogeneration plant at the site to reduce natural gas use by 20 percent and the addition of the biogas will cut natural gas usage overall another eight percent in the production process.

The use of feedstocks from the waste stream helps California biofuel producers meet new federal guidelines under the Renewable Fuel Standard. Ethanol produced in Pixley is far “greener” than Midwest corn ethanol in part because the coproduct of production — distiller’s grain — does not consume natural gas through the drying process as is practiced in the Midwest, but is sold to the local dairy industry wet.

With tight market conditions in 2008 and 2009 the CEC said about 86 percent of the state’s ethanol came from fuels made in the Midwest. With four of the five plants in the state idled in 2009 the state lost jobs, tax revenue and other income notes a CEC report.

Schlyer said production margins improved in 2010, allowing many idled plants to restart, but the margins are tough again this spring. He expects them to improve by summer.

He estimates it will take six months to get all the permits to build the digester and pipelines, and that the new unit could be operational in 12 months.

One innovation will be the piping of dairy waste from a dairy farm west of the plant — the wastewater will be returned to the dairyman, also by pipeline, and used for irrigation.

Another source of material for the digester will be dairy waste from several lagoons that will be tapped for solids and trucked to the site.

Dairies — increasingly under pressure to reduce methane and ammonia emissions to the air — will benefit from the program helping to clear the skies particularly if this demonstration program becomes much larger, as envisioned. One long range concept plan shows 15 miles of pipeline connected to more than score of dairies west of the plant all the way to Highway 43. For that to happen, the economics of making ethanol from waste biomass like manure will have to improve, Schyler said.

“Our hats are off to Calgren for this forward looking project” said fellow California ethanol producer Paul Koehler of Pacific Ethanol — a company just emerging from bankruptcy. Koehler says he expects Pacific Ethanol’s two idled plants in the north valley to start up in a matter of months.

Its possible the state will assist in the restarting of idled plants in California with the CEC holding a hearing on a plan to do just that April 29.

It is the state’s policy to reduce petroleum use in California by15 percent below 2003 levels and to reduce greenhouse  gases in the state to 1990 levels by 2050. Transportation fuels are the biggest source of greenhouse gases and substituting ethanol — lower in carbon intensity — for petroleum is a big part of the state plan.  
Another key CEC objective is to produce at least 20 percent of biofuels used in the state instead of importing them.

The funding for the Pixley project from the Energy Commission was announced April 7 after a statewide competition for some $21.5 million in budgeted funds to expand the use of biomethane in California. The CEC has some $100 million it is investing this year to stimulate renewable fuel use.

None of the other three projects in the category that were funded are from the Valley.