How much gas would one trade for all the cows in Wisconsin? No trade needed: a new 10,000-cow, manure-processing plant in Stephenville, Texas, southwest of Fort Worth, will produce some 650 million cubic feet of natural gas annually by the time it's up and running later this year. The facility is to come online in late August and the gas should start flowing a couple weeks thereafter. Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based Environmental Power Corp. (EPC) business unit Microgy Inc. has contracts for manure from three dairy farms in Wisconsin, and it is negotiating contracts for manure from farms in Texas and California. "This is the first time natural gas generated from manure will be transported through pipelines as a commodity," the 20-year-old company reports. The process, called anaerobic digestion, is common in Europe, and EPC has licensed the technology from a Danish company, Xergi. "This market is still fairly young in the United States because energy prices have only recently begun to rise, and because there is far less of a market for carbon-offset credits," EPC reports. For more on this, see the September issue of Oil and Gas Investor. For a subscription, call 713-260-6441.

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