$120 million manure-to-energy plant heads to phase 2
By Ben Unglesbee, St. Louis Business Journal.
An area company is working to make energy from a very stinky source.
Roeslein Alternative Energy, based in south St. Louis County and founded by Rudi Roeslein, is heading into the second phase of a $120 million project with Smithfield Foods' Hog Production Division to make natural gas out of livestock manure.
So far covers have been installed on nearly 45 manure lagoons at nine Smithfield farms in northern Missouri. The covers are meant to capture methane from the lagoons at one of the largest concentrations of finishing hogs in the Midwest, according to Roeslein Alternative Energy. The covers turn the lagoons into anaerobic digesters that can produce biogas which can then be burned for energy.