Energy

Written by Wilber W sood, For the Outpost
Wednesday, 18 June 2008

“That’s money!” exclaimed the senator when oil started dripping from the seed crusher into a receptacle.
The senator was Jon Tester, and the crusher was racketing away in a barn on the Charter Ranch, 20 miles north of Billings.
It was Friday, June 13, and Sen. Tester had just flown in from Washington, D.C., for the weekend. Two aides, Rachel Court and Dana Swanson, along with his Montana press secretary, Aaron Murphy, had accompanied him here – along with a news crew from KTVQ-television – and everyone was watching safflower seeds being poured into a container that fed them into a slowly revolving hopper that heated the seeds before the oil was separated from the husks.
Tester would soon board a flight out of Billings to Great Falls, and from there travel to his farm near Big Sandy. Would he just kick back and relax? No, he had to get some work done.
“I think I may have to do some swathing,” he said.
The Tester family farm, an organic operation in north-central Montana’s “Golden Triangle,” was being tended while the senator and his wife resided in the nation’s capital, but Tester said that their son-in-law had not yet moved there full-time to run the farm.
So Tester has had to simplify. He used to raise a variety of crops, but now he’s down to just two. Half of his family’s 1,400 acres are planted to kamut, an ancient grain with unusually large kernels, high in protein, possibly a variety of durum wheat, that originated in the Middle East. He sells this to a growing niche market - many natural food stores buy kamut for its nutritional qualities - while the other half of his acres are planted to peas.
He could harvest some peas this year, he told me, “but I’ll probably just plow them back in,” since their primary function is as a “green manure” crop. Peas, lentils, beans of various kinds, as well as plants like black medic are used by organic farmers because they “fix” nitrogen from the air and thus can provide a homegrown substitute for fossil-fuel derived fertilizers.
“Homegrown” is the key word here – eliminating more and more expensive fossil-fuel based chemical “inputs” – and this includes homegrown fuel to run tractors and trucks on the farm.
Tester fully supports the idea of farmers producing their own fuel, on a variety of scales – be they farm-ranch operations such as what Jeanne and Steve Charter are experimenting with, or cooperative efforts among groups of farmers, or community-scale businesses such as one that Earl Fisher is setting up in Chester.
I asked Tester if he’d heard how that Chester operation was coming along, and he said, “One step forward, a couple steps back, then maybe two steps forward.” But he had hopes that it would become a success.
One of Tester’s neighbors near Big Sandy is Bob Quinn, a fellow organic farmer who actually developed the modern form of kamut. Quinn is also a renewable energy entrepreneur who calculated a few years ago that he ought to be able to plant approximately 8 percent of his acreage to oilseed crops and produce enough fuel to power his entire farming operation.
Quinn is among a number of Montana farmers and ranchers now experimenting with growing and extracting oils from safflower, flax, canola, camelina or other crops. They either burn these vegetable oils directly in their vehicles or, in a relatively simple process, add certain ingredients and convert the triglycerides in these oils to single-chain fatty acids and produce biodiesel.
At the Charter Ranch, however, the main challenge has been getting this particular machine to produce oil without continually clogging up. Two biofuel enthusiasts with mechanical expertise, Craig Hall and Rick Williams, have been tinkering with this machine since the Charters imported it from India awhile ago, and they are here tinkering with it today.
They are aided by Ressa Charter (Steve and Jeanne’s son) and by Paul Miller, a Billings man who is on the verge of buying a larger oilseed crusher, and is considering putting it on a trailer and towing it to farms to crush oilseeds in a similar way that crews travel from farm to farm to harvest wheat or from ranch to ranch to shear sheep.
Jon Tester spent a lot of time in discussion with Craig Hall, who runs his own truck exclusively on “waste” vegetable oil garnered from various restaurants around Billings.
After Tester left for the Billings airport, Hall and Williams were still discussing certain internal adjustments, and also noting Tester’s suggestion that chrome plating the innards of the crusher likely would reduce the number of times operators would have to stop the process to scrape away seed husks clinging to the grinder.
“Good idea, but expensive,” said Williams.
But Hall and Williams were happy. “This machine decided to work better today than it ever has.”
Most oilseed crushing operations in Montana are clustered along the northern tier, and most so far have focused on producing higher value cooking oils and lubricants. Fuel is down the list.
The payoff for livestock producers like the Charters would be to derive some fuel, at a competitive price with petroleum-derived diesel, but perhaps more importantly to use the highly nutritious residue from this process to feed cattle or sheep or hogs.
Farmers like Bob Quinn also see the advantage of using oilseed crops in rotation with wheat and other grains. Managed properly, oilseed crops, whether used for fuel or lubricants or food, can actually enhance Montana soils, not deplete them.
And of course, the more localized the production and consumption, the better. Hauling feedstocks too many miles eliminates the advantage, and hauling the fuel or livestock feed too many miles does the same thing.
Coming from a rural town, Tester understands this, mentioning without prompting the value of decentralized production - not only of biofuels but also of other “second crops” for Montana farms and ranches.
The more localized the energy system, the less money is exported, and more money remains to circulate through in the local community.
Reaping the wind
Another important Montana “energy crop” is windpower.
Tester’s neighbor, Bob Quinn, also ran the windpower consulting firm which took on the difficult task of developing Montana’s first large scale wind farm at Judith Gap, doing all the energy and environmental studies, obtaining all the permits, up to the point where the project needed a large infusion of capital to proceed.
Quinn’s group then sold the project to Invenergy, a Chicago-based company that raises money to develop wind farms and also natural gas power plants around the United States.
Invenergy now runs Judith Gap, supplying as much as 135 megawatts of some of the lowest priced electricity in the region to NorthWestern Energy, on a 20-year contract.
As valuable as Judith Gap is to the local economy, creating more than a dozen jobs, raising Wheatland County’s tax base, sending lease payments to private landowners and state government (many of its 90 generators are sited on state lands), the profits do flow out of state.
While glad to have participated in Judith Gap, Bob Quinn no longer wants to work on that large-scale, centralized basis.
He has told me that he’d prefer to see up to three megawatts of windpower installed at every electricity substation in the state where there is a decent breeze.
Tester agrees with this approach, commenting that one virtue of decentralized windpower is that while “the wind might not be blowing in Big Sandy, it could very well be blowing in Big Timber.”
However, as he slipped into the car that would take him to the airport, the senator said, “Realistically, what we’re probably going to see is both things – both large and small-scale renewable energy.”