Manure Power Faces Edison Challenge : Energy: Last season’s heavy rains adversely affect use of cattle droppings as fuel, dealing Imperial Valley plant a sharp setback. The fate of its pact with the electric company will be decided by a federal panel.
Michael O’Leary stood in front of the world’s only cattle manure-to-energy plant, now idle, and called manure the dirtiest name he could think of.
“Manure is a hostile fuel,” said O’Leary, the plant manager. “It really is.”
It is not the only hostile thing in O’Leary’s world.
Depending on what a federal energy commission decides this week, his plant may be forced by Southern California Edison into bankruptcy, leaving it nothing more than a 140-foot-tall monument to a failed excremental vision and a change in the nation’s energy outlook.
How things got this way is a story of manure, beef and energy politics.
The world has untold billions of head of cattle but it had not one cattle manure power plant until a group of American investors teamed up with West German technocrats in the mid-1980s to build the $47-million experimental plant in the Imperial Valley, where cattle outnumber people.
The plant fired up for business in 1988 and began selling power to Edison under a program devised during the Jimmy Carter Administration that requires the giant utilities to buy power from independent producers who use alternative sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal. The contract with Edison calls for the manure plant to supply 15 megawatts of power, enough to light 15,000 homes.
Amid much bonhomie about being “entremanures” and manure moguls, the investors were in the chips for several years. The cattle in the nearby feedlots produced plenty of manure, the plant burned the manure to turn the generator, and Edison kept sending checks.
For the valley’s cattlemen, the Mesquite Lake plant was a godsend. Instead of paying farmers to haul the stuff off, the cattlemen were able to sell their manure to the plant.
“It was wonderful,” said Edward (Jiggs) Johnson, a co-owner of El Toro Land & Cattle Co. in Heber.
Then along came the torrential rains of early last year. The fractious chemical nature of manure, never easy to deal with even in the driest of times, became impossible.
The manure got soaked and the plant’s boilers suffered rust and other gaseous problems. The plant that had consumed 1 million tons of manure in the previous five years lost its ability to turn manure into power.
A year later, the plant is not back on line. If it flops, cattlemen are not sure what they will do with the mountains of manure that are the byproduct of their industry.
To make matters worse, the federal Clean Water Act becomes effective for feedlots next year. Owners could be subject to stiff fines, even prosecution, if manure is discovered to be polluting local waters.
The water act and the possible death of the manure plant could not have come at a more inopportune time for the Imperial Valley, which has three-quarters of California’s feedlot cattle and, if all goes as planned, could have more cattle--and manure--in the near future.
Some feedlots hope to expand their herds to break into the NAFTA-era beef market in Mexico. Also, the county’s economic planners are trying mightily to lure dairy farms away from urbanizing areas such as Chino.
The specter of more manure and no place to put it has Juan Guerrero, livestock adviser for the UC Cooperative Extension office in Holtville, predicting an economic and environmental crisis if the plant shuts down.
“You know what they say about cattle manure rolling downhill,” Guerrero said. “Well, we live in a valley here.”
Upward of 450,000 cattle pass through the Imperial Valley feedlots each year, spending several months fattening up on their way to slaughterhouses in Los Angeles and Phoenix. A single animal, munching contentedly on grain and corn, can drop 1,500 pounds of manure a year.
Anything that disturbs the cattle industry disturbs chronically depressed Imperial County, where unemployment hovers near 30% among the population of 131,000. The cattle industry accounts for 27% of the county’s agricultural income.
“In Imperial County, it isn’t carrots, cauliflower or broccoli that’s number one,” Guerrero said. “It’s cattle.”
When last year’s rains turned the cattle manure to a fecal soup, the power plant switched to natural gas to heat its boilers. To keep its 30-year contract with Edison, the plant has to provide a steady stream of energy.
The catch is that the contract limits the plant to using no more than 25% natural gas. To get a waiver from that rule, the plant’s owners--a group of South Carolina-based investors who go by the name New Charleston Power--appealed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Soon the plant found itself with two powerful opponents: the California Public Utilities Commission and Rosemead-based Edison.
Edison argued that it should not have to pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity produced at the manure plant by natural gas. On the open energy market, electricity goes for about 3 cents.
The 10-cent-per-kilowatt figure is the price set by the contract for manure-produced electricity, a price that factors in the social and environmental benefits of using manure.
Edison figures it is owed between $6 million and $9 million for overpayments made to the manure plant in 1993. That represents the difference between what it paid the manure plant while it was using natural gas and the price it would have paid on the energy market for a similar quantity of electricity.
Manure plant boosters say that the mammoth Edison has never been comfortable being forced to do business with independent electricity producers and is taking this opportunity to squash the manure plant.
They note that Edison also opposed two solar power producers in the Mojave Desert when they ran into difficulty and needed federal waivers.
In December, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sided with Edison, calling the manure plant technology a failure. The manure plant owners appealed and hired Carol Smoots, a Washington attorney with a record of beating Edison on such appeals.
“Edison has taken a very hard line on any technological problems or need for waivers,” Smoots said. “Their preference is that these plants go out of business, in my opinion.”
Spokesmen for Edison say the company is only looking out for its customers, who should not have to pay inflated prices for electricity.
“We are not out to put them (the manure plant) out of business,” said Jack Fenelon, Edison’s program manager for efficiency monitoring. “That’s not our play. We want to work with them.”
Smoots, teamed with San Diego attorney Bill Eigner, argues that it would be “incredibly shortsighted” for the regulatory commission to abandon the manure plant. The glut of hydro-electric power could dry up, she said, leaving the nation again hunting for alternative sources.
But local politicians, who have seen the federal government seemingly turn a deaf ear to other problems in the Imperial Valley, like the fetid New River, fear the worst. “Edison has a lot more clout than we do,” said Imperial County Supervisor Wayne Van de Graaff.
The commission is set to consider the plant’s appeal Wednesday.
If the commission rejects the appeal and orders plant investors to pay Edison, it could bankrupt the venture, just as it is getting close to solving its technological problems, O’Leary and Smoots said.
Finding an alternative venue for the manure will not be easy.
Cattle manure is high on salt and low on nitrogen and thus not favored by farmers for fertilizer. When it is used on crops, additional irrigation is required, although that might not be feasible once the Clean Water Act kicks in.
“It’s going to be a big, expensive, smelly problem,” said Jiggs Johnson of the El Toro feedlot. Jim Moiola of the Moiola Bros. feedlot in Brawley agreed. “It’s going to be a hell of a mess.”
