The cattle countries are at its best venture to use their natural local resources. The ethanol production plants in Hereford, Texas, and Mead, Nebraska are under construction, which will fuel them by cow manure!
Amidst the controversy on the contribution of ethanol towards the environment – the fossil-fuel consumption in the traditional ethanol production – in a cattle town in the Texas Panhandle — Hereford, Dallas-based Panda Ethanol is building a production facility that will be powered by the region’s most abundant, but least appreciated resource — cow manure.
This new plant will be designed to extract methane — will be burned to generate the steam necessary for processing corn into ethanol — from 1 billion pounds (453,000 metric tons) of manure. It is the product of about 500,000 cows. This amount of manure will be able to generate 100 million gallons (378 million liters) of ethanol each year. To add tot e gain, it will also produce ash by-product.
