In today's age of "going green," the idea of converting cow manure into renewable energy may not be so foreign.
But chicken manure?
Fibrowatt -- a national company headquartered in Pennsylvania that converts poultry litter to energy -- opened the first plant powered by poultry droppings near Benson, Minn., in 2007.
The 55-megawatt power plant, Fibrominn, produces enough electricity to power about 40,000 homes through a burning process that utilizes up to 500,000 tons of poultry litter, according to officials.
Company officials said they have discussed doing similar projects in Texas, but local agriculture researchers said they don't think converting poultry droppings into reusable energy would be advantageous for the state at this point.
Mark Holtzapple, a chemical engineering professor at Texas A&M who focuses on creating "green" renewable energy, said converting poultry litter into electricity can result in negative consequences for the environment.
"There is usually a lot of nitrogen in manure, which when burned makes nitrogen oxide pollution," he said.
In December, Fibrominn officials agreed to pay $65,000 in fines and make $80,000 in improvements to their emissions monitoring systems after the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency alleged the company had violated state air-quality regulations including releasing excess nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide emissions.
Holtzapple said the litter could be better put to use in the MixAlco process he and colleagues at Terrabon -- a "green"-driven research and technology development firm -- recently mastered. MixAlco is a conversion technology that processes non-edible biomass into fuel through fermentation.
Terrabon officials said they combined poultry litter with other biomass materials when they successfully used the process to create gasoline for the first time in July.
The company is looking into building a commercial plant that would convert up to 1.3 million gallons of "green" gasoline a year he has estimated would cost about $1.75 to $2 per gallon, Holtzapple said, although details have not been finalized.
Other alternative energy researchers point out that hazardous emissions aren't the only potential challenges to feasibly converting the manure into energy. Poultry litter-to-energy systems can cost anywhere from $200,000 to more than $100 million and the high cost of such technology makes the practicality questionable, officials said.
Craig Coufal, a Texas AgriLife poultry extension specialist and an assistant professor at A&M, said he is aware that some states convert litter into power and isn't convinced the option would be efficient for Texans.
Often, he said, the litter-conversion process is used in areas where land available for litter application is more scarce, leaving farmers with an abundance of droppings they have to dispose of.
"We have adequate crop and pasture land available here in Texas," he said through an e-mail. "Farmers need the litter as a good organic fertilizer and soil amendment, particularly when fertilizer prices are too high."
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