Many of the trips taken by the EnergyRushTV team put us smack in the middle of big cities. After all, that’s where much of the innovation in alternative vehicles and cleantech development is taking place. But we went on a daytrip recently that placed us far from the metropolitan areas.

The mission: to learn more about biofuels and specifically their origins. We’d done plenty of homework on the other end of the biofuel spectrum, having covered numerous refineries and interviewed many scientists and entrepreneurs about the finished product, not to mention taking test rides in lots of cool biofueled vehicles. Now it was time to find out more about where the fuel comes from and how the early stages in the process work.

The EnergyRush project’s producer/director, Paul Steinbroner, along with producer/cameraman Mark DuMond, went to the Yakima Valley farm country in south central Washington State. (In addition to raw materials for biodiesel, the area in cranking out some of the best wines in the country, but that’s a different story for another time.) We spent the afternoon with Ted Durfee of Natural Selection Farms near the town of Sunnyside. Ted and his brother Tom gave us a tour of the facility and showed us how the whole thing works.

First, canola seed is grown on a farm less than 30 miles from the plant we visited, and it’s brought in by truck. The seeds, which look a lot like tiny black mustard seeds, are sorted and crushed, and their oil is expelled and isolated. The canola oil is then transported by tanker truck to a biodiesel refinery. The day we were there, thousands of gallons were being pumped into a tanker for delivery to the Imperium Renewables refinery in Grays Harbor near the Washington coast.

And this is where things get really interesting. The by-product of the process is a kind of mealy protein food source that is then taken to nearby dairies and fed to cows. There happen to be about a quarter-million cows in that county. They enjoy munching on the canola meal, and thus $25 million a year stays right there in the county.

But the story takes another turn, one that then took us to a dairy just a few miles away from Natural Selection Farms. We spoke with one of the owner/operators there and found that they have well over 4,000 cows, producing a vast amount of milk. Those cows also produce a vast amount of something else. That’s right, cow poop. In previous years, the poop was problematic, as it needed to be hauled away and disposed of. But now, this dairy has a $3.8 million methane digester, which processes the stuff and burns it to create energy. We asked the dairy farmer if he generated enough to power the entire farm, and he said he creates enough electricity to power over 800 homes! They sell the poop-to-power electricity to the power company to generate additional revenue for the dairy.

And there’s even more to the story. The by-product of the methane process is then turned into garden mulch that the dairy markets to retailers, and the stuff ends up in gardens around the region. This seed story illustrates the very epitome of a “closed loop” system where nothing is wasted, everything is cleaner (including the air, because methane gas is burned off instead of staying in the air), and since the whole process keeps everything in-state, less fuel is used to transport everything. Oh yeah, and it’s good for the regional economy too, as all the dollars involved stay in the area. Talk about a win-win situation.

Thanks to the Durfees for letting us hang around their place. We look forward to putting the resultant biodiesel in our EnergyRushTV vehicles. Watch for more stories about our travels and all the fantastic stuff we’re digging up at EnergyRushTV.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Production Logs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.