It can be done!

It may at times seem impossible for us in the west to completely give up our coal, oil, and natural gas usage for energy. Well according to a story in the New York Times a Swedish city has managed to almost completely do that.

But Kristianstad has already crossed a crucial threshold: the city and surrounding county, with a population of 80,000, essentially use no oil, natural gas or coal to heat homes and businesses, even during the long frigid winters. It is a complete reversal from 20 years ago, when all of their heat came from fossil fuels.

But this area in southern Sweden, best known as the home of Absolut vodka, has not generally substituted solar panels or wind turbines for the traditional fuels it has forsaken. Instead, as befits a region that is an epicenter of farming and food processing, it generates energy from a motley assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines.

What they have done is to use the agricultural products to produce methane and then capture this to burn to produce steam to turn the turbine in the power plant. They also manage to take some of this and convert it to fuel for cars. Methane is a type of natural gas and as with natural gas it burns much cleaner than these other sources of energy. This source of energy would be hard to manage in some of the larger cities in the U.S. and Europe but for areas where there is already plenty of agricultural waste this is a potential energy source.

The difference between this and the use of ethanol as the U.S. mandated for gasoline is that it uses waste. The ethanol that the U.S. uses comes from corn this is corn that could have been used for eating or agricultural land used for something else. Instead this uses waste that has already been produced and will be produced no matter what and converts it into natural gas.

In the United States, biogas systems are rare. There are now 151 biomass digesters in the country, most of them small and using only manure, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The E.P.A. estimated that installing such plants would be feasible at about 8,000 farms.

So far in the United States, such projects have been limited by high initial costs, scant government financing and the lack of a business model. There is no supply network for moving manure to a centralized plant and no outlet to sell the biogas generated.

Still, a number of states and companies are considering new investment.

It is nice to see that the idea is making inroads into the U.S. but it makes sense considering that consumers want to continue to receive cheap electricity but the backlash against higher carbon producers and against drilling and mining in general. This is positive but more work needs to be done as we try to clean up our act on the environment.