 "Photo: Sam Grenadier")
A Texas Tech environmental engineer offered one possible solution to the United States' energy problems Monday evening in the Human Sciences building, and it's not corn ethanol or wind power.
During his presentation to the Tech Renewable Energy Society, Clifford Fedler said he had an ideal plan for producing 80 percent of the country's annual electrical energy needs in a way pleasing to both the economy and the environment. Bio-fuel - more specifically, a combination of animal waste and a plant called water hyacinth - could transform the United States from a fossil-fuel addict to a sensible user of its own byproducts.
"It's really a matter of looking at what potential we have and where this potential lies, and then, what are your limitations," he said.
Because the southern high plains region produces enough cow manure each day to fill the Jones AT&T Stadium twice, Fedler said, the local availability of bio-fuel is astounding. Unfortunately, however, few local energy producers see the potential in manure, so they leave it in the field to waste away.
"There's not a cow out there who's not going to produce something every day," he said. "He's not going to be able to hold it in that long."
Another often-overlooked biological power plant, water hyacinth, Fedler said, produces vast amounts of energy on relatively small plots of land.
If Lubbock residents were to realize the potential of these two energy sources and begin a gradual shift toward their utilization, he said, it would not only yield economically more viable energy production, but the impact on the environment would be very low and the production cycle, itself, would be self-sustaining and renewable.
Progress has been slow, however, until approximately five years ago when West Texas seemed to finally wake up and smell the cows, Fedler said. The pace of changes still is slow.
He said convincing people to adopt change on this scale is "like powering a locomotive with a rubber band," because "it'll get there, but it will take some time." Even the economic benefits of bio-fuel fail to entice change.
"There is a little bit of a problem," he said. "Think of a cattle producer. What do they know? They know cattle, and they know cattle very, very well. Then I come in here and say, 'Why don't you try water hyacinth?' They look at me and they say, 'What? You've got to be nuts.'"
Lindsay Reed, the faculty adviser for the Tech Renewable Energy Society, said he invited Fedler to speak after overhearing a conversation between him and another engineer about the plausibility of renewable energy.
A problem as complex as energy shortages and environmental decline, he said, requires a very abstract and often far-fetched solution. The solution for the energy issue only will come if the world begins thinking about it in bold new ways.
"It's all up in the air right now," he said. "There's no clear plan of what we're going to do. We know that there's problems - too much pollution, too much global warming, peak oil - all those types of problems call for this kind of thinking, I think, where you look at various solutions."
Fedler said he still remembers the moment he saw the potential in animal waste. When he was a child, his father would ask him to go outside and clean up the swine house.
"Needless to say, I thought that there's got to be something else we can do with this crap," he said.
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