Missouri hardly produces any natural gas, unless you count the hogs.
The methane wafting from the manure ponds at swine farms across the state is increasingly funneled into pipelines and delivered to power plants and homes, where it is burned alongside shale gas for heat, hot showers and cooking.
Smithfield Foods Inc., the country’s largest pork producer, expects to be selling gas from all of its Missouri farming operations by summer. Most of its farms already feed methane into the gas grid. Once covers are stretched across the 4-acre lagoons at the rest and then connected to equipment that removes carbon dioxide and impurities from the fumes, Smithfield expects to supply enough gas in Missouri to fuel about 10,000 houses.
“We’ve been looking at how to make energy out of manure for a couple decades,” said Kraig Westerbeek, who leads Smithfield’s renewable energy business. “We’ve had some failures, but these projects show that you can actually get it done.”
Companies’ rush to affiliate with the reduction of greenhouse gases is making a big business out of harnessing the methane seeping from heaps of organic waste. So-called renewable natural gas can be produced in commercial quantities at swine and dairy farms, landfills, wastewater-treatment facilities and from spoiled food and slaughterhouse sludge.
