Normally we regard NIMBY problems at least vaguely as moral problems — folks want to use a bunch of electricity, but they don’t want the nuclear plant in their back yard. I don’t know how much dairy the folks in Union County are consuming, but I still don’t blame them for not wanting the Union Go Dairy in their back yard.
The problem of the day seems to be a bubbling 20 million gallon manure lagoon. One possibility is that the methane gas has gotten under the lining. The Dairy recently settled a claim related to discharging manure into a local creek and has been cited twice by IDEM for failing to maintain the minimum freeboard in the lagoon.
It can’t be a good feeling when your neighbor is prone to, or at least capable of, discharging literally rivers of shit.
Environmental discharges have always seemed to me to be one of the weaker points of the anti-government, strict property rights model of government. (The corporate form is the other primary one in my mind). We just don’t have good mechanisms for monitoring and valuing the damage done through pollution of various sorts, particularly on the individual level. Government regulators do an indifferent job, but they at least have resources and expertise not available to individuals who might ingest water or air contaminated through the actions of another.
These days, the methane coming off those ponds is quite valuable.
Munster’s dump has been capped, piped up to draw off the methane, and they’re installing microturbines to produce electricity by burning the methane.
Munster used to make a lot of money from tipping fees at the dump. Now they’ve got a revenue stream from the electricity.
The dairy pollution problem is really just another revenue opportunity. That’s the flip side of high energy prices. It is something good that will result from a bad.
Dude-that’s Randolph County. Union County is Liberty.
Growing up with two creeks in my parent’s back yard, I can tell you right now there’s nothing grosser than wading in water that you’re not quite sure what it contains. I mean it didn’t stop me from playing in the creek; but maybe that explains my third nipple;-) (Just kidding-don’t really have one!)
Also, once that… crap… is processed, it too is quite valuable as fertilizer. Oil is the feedstock of chemical fertilizers, so high prices makes cow manure in and of itself much more valuable.
That’s my biggest beef with government regulation. Regulation comes from a mindset that government’s purpose is to solve problems. In fact, the track record of government is such that it has solved very few problems.
In the case of the environment, I would rather the government use regulation to prevent problems than solve them. For instance, effective regulations backed by adequate enforcement to prevent Superfund type sites form occuring in the first place, rather than having to pick up the tab a couple of decades later after the offending business has already taken the money and left us with the mess.
I’ll admit to ignorance on cowpoop lagoons. Do they exist as some kind of septic system like my house has, with the goal that something clean ends up exiting at some point? Or are they designed like the coal slurry impoundment lakes in Appalachia, where you just dump it somewhere because that’s tomorrow’s problem and we’ll just leave it for later?
I’m just wondering, because I would think that piles and piles of sun-dried cowpaddies would be a bit more pleasant than giant lakes of perpetually moist ones.
In brief, you have the lagoons so that the biological breakdown of the sewage happens in one place – preferably where it won’t bother anyone (like in your adjoining creek or river, or in the worst case, your water supply line…)
Same thing as happens in a sewage treatment plant, but more passive than active (in treatment plants they do things like blow air through the waste flow to speed up the ‘digestion’ process.
You still need enough capacity to avoid overflows, and you still have solids to get rid of. Some treatment plants burn the stuff – depending on the design, sometimes they add oil to get it to burn (if their design does not ‘de-water’ the stuff to burn on its own).
And yes, it does flow downhill – and a civil engineer can tell you the size of the pipe you need…
Thanks.
It certainly looks like sewage is getting under the liner. Getting back to Buzzcut’s point about harvesting the methane, it seems like it would be fairly simple to do, looking at how well these bubbles are being contained by the liner. Seems like you could just put a second liner on top, wait for it to form a big bubble, and pump the methane out.