Trivia question: Do you know the total weight of the livestock--i.e. all of the pigs, chickens, and cows-- in the United States? If you guessed 95 billion pounds, you'd be right. (Cows account for 80.7 billion of the total). And annually, the annual manure output from these collective animals contains 928 trillion BTUs a year, according to a study from the University of Texas. (Read more here.) Interest in manure power has been growing. Earlier this year, Microgy, after a few delays, managed to get its large manure-to-gas facility in Texas operational. Pacific Gas & Electric is running manure trials. Meat packers like Swift & Co. are also experimenting. The plan is to sell natural gas (which can be burned as gas or converted into electricity in a power plant) and sell carbon credits. Biogas from manure is 2/3s methane so after a little scrubbing it can be shipped down commercial pipelines. In 2007, you started heard a lot of chatter about manure power at investor conferences. Thanks to UT, we know have a better sense of what these animals could do if they banded together. If the biogas from American's farm animals was channelled into the production of electricity, it could produce 68 to 108.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, depending on the conversion efficiencies, according to the study. The U.S. consumes 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours. Averaging everything out, the farm animals could provide up to 2.9 percent of electrical power to the U.S. with a more realistic average around 1 percent. As an added bonus, processing manure in this way would also elimimate tons of greenhouse gases, particularly methane. "In total, GHG emissions from the agricultural sector in the US amounted to 536 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon dioxide equivalent, or 7% of the total US emissions in 2005. Of this agricultural contribution, 51 to 118 MMT of carbon dioxide equivalent resulted from livestock manure emissions alone, with trends showing this contribution increasing from 1990 to 2005." Manure power could also offset carbon emissions. Overall, the reductions could amount to 99 million to 59 million fewer metric tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Several European countries are investing in digesters to convert farm waste into gas or electricity. My relatives showed me one in Germany recently. Let me dig out the picture and will post that too. Go cows.