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Company seeks manure power
Hog industry disputes pollution allegations
By Matthew Weaver
Capital Press
www.CapitalPress.com
A Las Vegas-based energy company hopes to help farmers convert waste to energy.
Energy-Inc. recently signed a contract to install an advanced thermal conversion plant at the Greenville, N.C., High ridge Farm, which raises about 3,000 hogs. John O'Hurley, founder of ?Energy-Inc., said the waste-to-energy technology takes almost any form of waste and converts it to energy.
The outgoing host of TV's "Family Feud" and an actor on such television shows as "Seinfeld," O'Hurley said the plant will help fight the perception of hog farms as major polluters. The company resolved an issue with specific elements in hog waster that make it particularly difficult to use with such technology, he said.
'"we take it from the worst polluters int he country to a neighborhood-friendly business," he said. "All of the stench and all of the problems with the effluent, the leaching, the spraying and the lagoons are all gone.:
In the case of the hog industry, he said, the waste that was a liability has become an asset. The plant provides all the energy the farm needs, plus excess energy that can be sold back to the grid.
National Pork Producers Council Chief Environmental Counsel Michael Formica said the waste on hog farms is never a liability.
"We don't have waste on our hog farms, we have manure which we use as fertilizer" he said "We don't pollute at all."
Less than half of 1 percent of hog farms across the United States have any discharge at all during the course of a year, Formica said, the majority of which are smell, such as a hose break or similar event.
Formica said O'Hurley's technology may work, but the underlying premise regarding the hog industry is "completely false." The industry has had and impeccable environmental record over the last decade, he said.
Energy-Inc. plants could also be used on operations with diary and beef cattle or chickens, O'Hurley said.
Each plant costs about $3.5 million , and O'Hurley said the return on investment is between two and five years.
Formica said the industry is always looking for new technologies and projects to generate energy, but has found none that are cost effective. Installing digesters or lagoon-treatment systems have provided the most value, he said, but those systems aren't returning profits without federal tax credits.
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