Cow power!

The Process

Strictly speaking, the animals on a farm are the methane generators, since it is the breakdown of their waste that produces this gas used to generate electricity. Well-established farm technologies, combined with a groundswell of interest in innovative energy sources, have led to the development of several systems that can harness the passive power of escaping gases.

Anaerobic decomposition, or bacteria breaking down materials in the absence of oxygen, generates volumes of methane. Historically, these and other waste gases have been allowed to merely evaporate into the atmosphere. But by collecting animal waste into covered lagoons and gathering the resulting gas, the waste can fuel a heat-powered electric generator. Excess energy not used for farming purposes can be sold to the local electric utility company and distributed out to the electric grid.

One Lancaster, Pa. farm, which recently completed a methane collection system, houses 1,400 head of dairy cattle and 250,000 broiler chickens. By converting collected gases, the farm produces 4 to 5 megawatts of electricity every day, most of which is sold back to the grid. This amount of electricity can power up to 200 homes per day.

How it Works

Barns are outfitted with flush tanks, which collect animal waste, which is then flushed to collecting tanks in a buried or covered pit, known as a lagoon. The lagoon complex usually includes one or more overflow pits per lagoon; this helps keep lagoon volumes and rates of gas production consistent. Waste breaks down best at temperatures between 40 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, so concrete-lined pits in colder areas may be equipped with insulation and heaters to keep the temperature consistent throughout the year.

Bacteria present in the animal waste begins to break down the solids, releasing carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen sulfide, known collectively as biogas. An alternate design, called a plug-flow system, has concrete tanks with an agitator, which prevents solids from crusting and evenly distributes solids for uniform decomposition.

Waste gases are collected through an outlet tube at the top of the tank and are then fed into a generator system. Most engines generate power by burning the methane via internal combustion, which produces electricity. Since the hydrogen sulfide gas byproduct is corrosive to combustion engines, it is removed either through microbial pit filters or scrubbers in the generating plant.

Once biogases are removed, the remaining solids either continue to accumulate for later removal or are piped out and dried for use as fertilizer. Many of the leftover solids consist of nitrogen, phosphorous, copper and zinc, and with minimal treatment may be spread over cropland as a fertilizer.

Costs

Costs for installing a biogas collection and combustion system can be prohibitively high for small farms, which take much longer to recoup the costs than a larger farm. The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, which operates on a grant by the US Department of Agriculture, estimates that a 150-head pig farm might build an anaerobic methane generator system for $25,000, though a 5,000-head dairy farm system could cost upward of $1.3 million. Depending on the amount of electricity generated and sell-back rates, these systems can take three to seven years or more to realize a profit.

The US Environmental Protection Agency, in conjunction with other federal and state agencies, provides grants and other financial assistance for farmers interested in building a methane collection and electricity generation system.

Concerns

Methane and hydrogen sulfide are also poisonous gases, and in sufficient quantities can kill a human by asphyxiation in only seconds. Should the gas collection system somehow rupture, these gases are more or less safe as long as they disperse into the air. However, if a system failure requires maintenance in a closed, confined space, workers must observe proper safety measures, including use of a self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA).

Reference Links:

• North Carolina State University: Biogas Anaerobic Digester Considerations
• EPA Methane Recovery Workshop Summary
• Oregon.gov: Biomass Energy

Additional Resources:

• US Senate Agriculture Committee: Testimony of Luke Brubaker
• Anaerobic Digestion of Animal Wastes: Factors to Consider
• Cornell University: Hydrogen Sulfide Safety Fact Sheet

Article URL:

http://www.ehow.com/how-does_5839767_methane-generators-used-farms-work.html

When I was a kid growing up, my dad was a conservation cop.

He’d incessantly lecture us to turn off the faucet when we were brushing our teeth. We were only to use running water to rinse dirty dishes after soaping them, rather than leave the tap on. He’d constantly berate us to turn off the lights whenever we left a room, and my mother’s cold bones got no comfort from his habit of turning down the thermostat even in the winter (in Germany!).

But as far as I can tell, my dad wasn’t concerned about the environmental costs of running water or burning lightbulbs — he was concerned about the pennies that added up to become extra dollars owed for each month’s utility bills.

It’s funny, though, because now when I go to visit my parents, my dad isn’t much different. He still unscrews lightbulbs in the bathroom vanity (there are four, and usually two are unscrewed — even though they are the power-saving variety). He still opens the doors in the early morning to let cool air into the house to delay turning on the air conditioning, and still asks me to turn off the water a lot. Thankfully now that I’m grown up, he no longer sticks his head into the bathroom while I’m in the shower to growl at me to “keep it short.”

He’s still frugal, but now he has an additional defense. As he turns off the kitchen faucet in the middle of dishes, he’ll chirp, “It’s eco-friendly to save water!” My dad, an unwitting environmental pioneer before his time.

There are innumerable articles and analyses of the “green fad” — how buying Product X “using more post-consumer materials” reduces your personal carbon footprint, or my recent personal favorite, Ziploc brand’s new line of resealable baggies with “25 percent less plastic made with 100% wind power!” Now you can have guilt-free resealable glee.

I think it’s great that grocery stores are pushing the whole reusable tote thing. But I’m with my dad on this one: if they were really so concerned about the environment, they’d be giving them away rather than trying to stick you for a buck to buy one. I have no sympathy for high-end retailers who are being “forced” to drop prices to lure newly destitute shoppers to buy their wares:

Starbucks dropped the price of a medium iced coffee last week to just under $2. American Eagle cut out the ribbon from the inside waistband of its khakis and lowered the cost. Pottery Barn launched a new “Comfort Collection” sofa that starts at $999.99, which is $300 less than the “Basic Collection” sofa. Even Rock & Republic, whose trendy denim has graced the backsides of celebrities such as Victoria Beckham, recently unveiled a line of recessionista jeans selling for $128, a 29 percent reduction. (Washington Post, May 12, 2009)

I’m sure there exists a detailed, convoluted doctoral thesis on how America evolved from the penny-pinching Recession-era survival habits of our grandsires into a culture of shopping-therapy addicts. But it’s ironic that the ongoing fiscal crisis is forcing many to dramatically change their habits, engendering new behaviors that mesh rather conveniently with the talking points of the environmental movement.

One “green tips” website suggests cutting out meat on weekdays, limiting carnivorous activity to weekend cookouts. The argument is that it will not only save you money, but mollify your carbon-guilty soul.

Consider also the broader effect.

• If more of us ate less meat, the big cattle and hog feedlots would inevitably feel the pinch.
• Some would close, or reorganize into smaller units for quality rather than quantity.
• Since we’d be eating more plant matter, more money will go towards farms and agriculture…
• …requiring a concerted, concentrated effort support local, sustainable farms, thereby limiting exposure to huge commercial agriculture–which has its own set of problems that are separate, but equal, to those of the commercial meat industry.

We absolutely do vote with our dollars.

It’s a stubborn problem because it requires pervasive, permanent changes in behavior. As a culture, we’d much rather buy our way out — patronizing products with claims of environmentally friendly manufacturing, or cars with batteries, or cleaning chemicals that are “all natural.”

A paper published in 2004 by Dr. Phillip Payne for the Australian Association for Research in Education studied 42 families in the Melbourne, Australia area to determine how they constructed their environmental commitments and behaviors. One key finding: many families’ attitudes towards frugal, anti-consumerist lifestyle choices — which tend to align with “environmental” tenets — are shaped by early and frequent international travel, exposure to different cultures, experiencing tolerance for differences, home farming, and generous opportunities for outdoor discovery as children. Families who also tended to make lifestyle choices that limit overall income reported that these choices increased happiness and contentment.

So is frugality the essence of a lasting environmental movement? By keeping your dollar in your pocket and making do with what you’ve got until it’s gone — is it these things, not buying the latest “green” item, are what will make the long-term difference? Thriftiness doesn’t have to mean you’re poor anymore — it increasingly means you’re green, if the title is what matters to you.

As the Depression-era adage goes: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

The color purple was chosen for its wavelength--adult emerald ash borers (and other kinds of insects) are attracted to the color, and the smell of a bait oil the traps are doused with.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a strange, three-sided purple whatsit hanging in a tree. I was mystified, but my best guess was that it was some local artist’s public display, since it makes sense for the kind of neighborhood I live in. Two weeks later, I saw two more of them hanging in a park well removed from my artsy locale, so I finally gathered my wits to figure it out.

Turns out, those purple prisms are baited, glue-covered traps designed to attract the emerald ash borer, a beautiful jewel of an Asian beetle whose larvae have a knack for slowly and very effectively killing ash trees. The traps don’t bring the ash borer to the area — evidently, the beetles spread very slowly on their own — but the traps draw any adults present in an area so state forestry offices can try to pinpoint the “leading edges” of existing infestations.

I mentioned that the bug doesn’t really get far on its own. As far as the people in charge of tracking the insect can tell, the two main methods of spread are from people bringing firewood with them from home when they go on a camping trip, and affected nursery stock being shipped to places where the insect wasn’t before.

The emerald ash borer made its first public appearance in the United States in Michigan around 2002, having stowed away in wooden packing material from Asia roughly 10 years earlier. Despite a federal quarantine on shipping ash out of the state, the borer showed up in Fairfax County in 2003 after a Michigan tree nursery illegally sold infested ash saplings to a Prince George’s County nursery, which were then planted at a Fairfax elementary school. The county briefly got rid of the borer by chopping down several hundred trees in the affected areas, only to have it show up again in 2008, putting Virginia solidly in the “affected” category. Other states with EAB infestations and quarantines include  Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, Wisconsin, and parts of Canada. And on May 14, 2009, Minnesota discovered the insects for the first time in the St. Paul area.

Adult emerald ash borer.

The USDA’s Forest Service writes:

Ash occurs extensively in the natural and urban forests of the Eastern United States. In 2001, ash accounted for more than 149 million cubic feet of timber products nationwide. It is estimated that more than a billion ash trees are growing in the United States, and about 800 million of these occur in Michigan. As of 2005, at least 15 million ash trees have died from EAB in Michigan alone. This loss is especially noticeable in urban areas where ash, once considered a hardy shade tree, was used to replace American elm trees after their demise from Dutch elm disease.

According to Minnesota’s Natural Resources Division, the state “has one of the highest volumes of ash on forestland in the U.S. with an estimated 867 million forestland ash trees,” and is also used frequently as an urban street tree for its beauty and hardiness. Separately, a 2007 paper studying the economic impacts of a 100 percent loss of Ohio’s ash cohort (over 4 million trees) estimated that to cut and replace dead and dying trees would cost the state and its citizens between $1.8 and $7.6 billion –that’s just one state, and just one type of pest.

There are some efforts underway to figure out what to do with all the dead wood — as there will surely be. Benches, baby furniture and baseball bats are a few of the things I came across.

Wondering if you have any ash trees that might be affected? The main sign is defoliation at the edges of the tree, along with the presence of “D” shaped exit holes where the larvae-turned-adult borers dig their way out from beneath the bark.

Tip defoliation of young ash trees, and vigorous suckering at the lower levels of the plant.

Adults leave a telltale D-shaped exit hole.

Or wondering what an ash tree even looks like? Maryland’s Department of Agriculture has a useful identification site.

So today’s moral is:

Actual billboard in Iowa.

Several of the Mars Hill Mountain wind turbines in Maine.

Imagine my surprise today, after seeing nary a published word regarding anything Virginia has done for the environment lately, when I stumbled across something that has passed Virginia’s General Assembly and only awaits Governor Tim Kaine’s signature to make it law: easier permitting for renewable energy power generators.

Mainly, this means wind farms, though the law provides the same guarantees for a more lenient permitting process for sources that include “sunlight, wind, falling water, wave motion, tides, or geothermal power,” and, on a smaller scale, electricity generated by biomass or municipal solid waste.

Opponents, though, say the law is only designed to provide a tax shelter for big electrical interests, and worry besides that it will allow for mammoth (read: unsightly) turbine farms on the mountaintops of western Virginia — since the law is aimed at encouraging creation of wind farms with a capacity of up to 100 megawatts, considered by legislators to be “small-scale renewable.” Biomass power plants would be restricted to a 20-megawatt production capacity. The main voice of opposition to the bill, University of Virginia scientist Rick Webb, also cites concerns about the environmental impact on wildlife by the turbines themselves.

A Jan. 30, 2009 story in the Augusta Free Press quotes a number of researchers and cautionaries who say the legislation is poorly designed and will have a whole host of unintended consequences. They stress consideration of one item in particular: that a facility with a 100-megawatt capacity can in no way be defined as “small-scale.”

A newsletter article by UtiliPoint, Inc., an energy industry consulting and research firm, spends some time exploring what, exactly, a megawatt is, and uses a wind farm’s potential capacity as an example:

A megawatt (MW) is one million watts and a kilowatt (kW) is one thousand watts. Both terms are commonly used in the power business when describing generation or load consumption. For instance, a 100 MW rated wind farm is capable of producing 100 MW during peak winds, but will produce much less than its rated amount when winds are light. As a result of these varying wind speeds, over the course of a year a wind farm may only average 30 MW of power production.

Okay, that’s nice. But how much acreage does a 100-megawatt wind farm occupy?

In Bangor, Maine, the First Wind company just celebrated the opening of their second large-scale wind farm, a 57-megawatt, 38-turbine farm along the Stetson Mountain ridgeline. The first project, comprising 28 turbines with a production capacity of 42 megawatts, opened several years ago on Mars Hill Mountain, so the two projects total about 100 megawatts.  While I couldn’t find even an estimate of the acreage required to build a 100-megawatt wind farm, an analysis of European wind farms by the World Resources Institute estimates that adequate spacing would demand anywhere from 270 to 810 hectares, or 650 to 2,000 acres.

(Another reason I love Google: to get an idea of a how big a 2,000 acre city is, I typed in “2,000 acres city” and came up with this story:  “TradeWind Energy Leases 2,000 Acres for Wind Farm,” Kansas City Business Journal, Sept. 15, 2008.) You could fit 2.5 of New York’s Central Park into 2,000 acres, for instance.

In Maine, they’ve situated the farms along mountain ridges that were previously cleared by logging activity, and are in close proximity to existing powerline transmission systems.

This could also be accomplished in Virginia; maybe even West Virginia could get in on the game by siting wind farms on mountains and ridges have already been cleared by strip mining or logging. I doubt that wind farms will just start sprouting in everyone’s back yards in the mountains — besides, the Virginia bill provides for hefty fines (from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars) for violations of permitting as well as environmental impacts, and still mandates a a public comment period before any permit is issued for a turbine farm.

Full text of the Virginia renewables bill is here (S.B. 1347) , for you legal eagles and masochists out there.

A satellite view of the Chesapeake Bay estuary and tributaries.

Late Update: Maryland’s General Assembly passed the bill discussed in this post on April 13.

While I’m usually really annoyed by NBC Washington News Channel 4′s website coverage of, oh, generally everything (horrible typos, bad headlines, Wonkette blog posts masquerading as news), a little story posted yesterday caught my eye and made me wonder if a friend of mine had already heard of this legislation under debate:

Yesterday’s headline blared “Eco Friendly Poop Next For Chesapeake Bay?”  It’s a smug little headline for such a simple and critical issue — overly heavy nutrient loads in Chesapeake waters. However, the story concisely outlined the potential impacts of a bill that would begin the process of overhauling septic systems in close proximity to the Chesapeake’s waters (within 1,000 feet of the Bay or its tributaries.) As far as I can tell from looking at the online status of the bill, the Senate is on board.

Here’s what my friend had to say in response to my most recent post on Asian oysters:

I still think our local babies could make it. It would take a serious commitment. We’d have to pick a few large swaths of the Bay or nearby coastal estuaries. Any compromise on the location could doom the project. Make them absolutely off limits to development, wake, jet skis, anchoring, oystering, dragging, dredging. In other words, give them a real sanctuary, and two backups in case the first one is compromised.

Then put serious thought and money into overhauling sewage systems. Replant marshes and riparian buffers in those areas. Provide incentives for reforestation, permaculture, and no-till, low fertilizer methods. Examine the economics that make animal protein cheaper than vegetable protein even though production costs and environmental harm are greater.

While it doesn’t look like oysters are getting a Do Not Disturb sign yet, if the septic effort passes the House side by the time the Assembly adjourns on April 13, it’s one real and effective piece of action that would begin to alter what gets into the Bay.

If passed, the new law would require all new septic systems within the “Chesapeake and Atlantic Coastal Bays Critical Area” to be equipped with modern nitrogen-removal technology — basically, all properties within 1,000 feet of Bay and tributary waters. A property owner repairing or replacing an existing septic system would also be required to install nitrogen-capture systems as part of the upgrade. Currently, doing this is voluntary — no law exists that would compel property owners to install nitrogen-filtering upgrades to onsite sewage systems.

A property owner found in violation could face a maximum fine of $8,000 — but the bill provides for state-based assistance to pay for any upgrades, out of the Department of Environment’s Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund, as long as adequate funds exist.  The new law would go into effect on October 1, 2009.

The Fund’s annual report, posted in January, has a wealth of information on the status of Bay initiatives, and relevant to this topic, the report notes that as of Sept. 2008, $21.6 million was available in the septic system upgrade fund.

For an idea of how much it might cost a homeowner to install current nitrogen-filtering technology, a Google search revealed a technology called Nitrex, offered by the Massachusetts-based wastewater engineering firm Lombardi Associates. They claim their method removes roughly 97% of nitrates from household and industrial septic field wastes. And the cost?

For a typical residential septic system installation (3-4 bedroom home) the NITREX filter will cost approximately $4,200 – $5,000 (plus shipping and local installation costs). The pretreatment system materials costs are typically $8,000 – $12,000. With installation usually $4,000 – $6,000, a complete NITREX system cost would be $16,000 – $22,000.

So, while that’s a pretty steep cost, consider the impact of a 97% reduction in nitrogen runoff into bay waters. Alternately, consider the price if nitrogen runoff were not reduced by those volumes–especially since the Bay Restoration Fund estimates that there will be approximately 18 million people living within the Chesapeake watershed by 2020.

Additional info dredged up today (March 29): Virginia evidently just passed a bill during its 2009 session that makes grants directly available to homeowners and individuals to upgrade their home septic systems through the Virginia Natural Resources Commitment Fund. Previously, grants had only been available to

local governments, soil and water conservation districts, institutions of higher education and individuals who propose specific initiatives that are clearly demonstrated as likely to achieve reductions in nonpoint source pollution; (full bill text)

So, while this is good — it doesn’t go nearly as far as Maryland’s mandate.

Oyster fishermen on a Chesapeake Bay skipjack emptying their haul onto the deck.

Even before Virginia made a decision on the matter of introducing Asian oysters into the Chesapeake Bay, the folks over at the Virginia Seafood Council (VSC), the industry group that was running the trials, jumped the gun and decided to withdraw from the project.

On March 25, the Newport News Daily Press reported on a meeting of the Virginia Marine Resources Council (VMRC), at which the Virginia Seafood Council’s executive director, Frances W. Porter, appeared to withdraw the group’s application to introduce the non-native species to the bay. VSC had been looking at the possibility of farming Asian oysters to help boost state’s oyster industry, which has been sagging of late due to declining numbers of native Virginia oysters from overharvesting and chronic disease.

The VMRC had no comment, according to the Daily Press’s account of the meeting, nor does the VSC have any mention of the project on its website. The Virginia Seafood Council does, however, tout its efforts as supporting local seafood that is “Wild, Sustainable, and Available,” as any good lobby group should.

Maryland opposed the project outright; evidently the Army Corps of Engineers hasn’t made its final determination yet, but the Daily Press story hinted that VSC’s Porter had an inside tip that the Corps was going to recommend against introducing the Asian oysters, effectively dooming the effort.

A Mar. 20 story in the Salisbury (Md.) Daily Times reported that other Northeastern states have contacted the Corps to oppose the project:

Delaware, New Jersey and New York sent a letter recently to the corps opposing the introduction. The states said that even if batches of sterile oysters are introduced, they may inadvertently contain fertile oysters which could create a breeding population that could outcompete the native oysters in the Chesapeake. If that happens, even stringent bio-security measures may not be able to stop its spread, which Delaware said could threaten its restoration efforts in the Delaware Bay.

A final note, that has little to do with this specific issue but is an interesting factoid in its own right: The Virginia Seafood Council reports that the state is the 4th largest “producer of marine products” in the United States (estimated value: $500 million annually), and the VSC has a $250,000 annual budget for marketing the state’s seafood industry.

The county’s top seafood producer, as anyone might guess, is Alaska. Note the value of the salmon harvest, on its own:

Over 4.46 billion pounds of seafood was harvested from Alaskan waters in 2000, comprising approximately 48% the entire U.S. seafood harvest. In the same year, Alaska salmon harvester earnings reached $272 million, comprising 91% of the value of all salmon harvested in U.S. waters. (Alaska Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development)

If you guessed that Alaska’s seafood marketing budget would be correspondingly large, you win a cookie. Alaska’s seafood industry council (also promoting itself as “Wild, Natural and Sustainable” — I smell a conspiracy!) has a budget 100 times that of Virginia’s: $25 million annually.

How can little Virginia oysters compete with money like that?

To the handful of loyal readers (thanks, family and friends!) I apologize for the delay in posting anything new, but life has, as usual, gotten in the way, and I’ve been forced to reprioritize for a while to figure out how to handle everything that comes up in a typical day with a growing baby.I’ve been meaning to write a quick note on something interesting which has already been shot down in Virginia: a ban on plastic bags.

They’re ubiquitous: the ones you get in spades when you go to the grocery store to pick up bagels and cheese (one bag for each item, probably!) On top of being very handy to line bathroom trash cans and take your lunch to work, they’re also found in prominent public places: as flapping, tattered flags in the tops of trees, wound up among logjams of river debris, lodged in the bellies of sea turtles which have mistaken them for a jellyfish dinner, etc.  In 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that somewhere between 500 million and 1 trillion bags are used worldwide each year.

Virginia’s General Assembly introduced a bill that would ban the bags, for reasons ranging from the bags being general environmental nuisances to acquiescing to cotton farmers’ complaints that the bags mucked up the cotton bales. But the plastics lobby had their way with things in Richmond, and legislators killed the bill. Critics have also said that paper bags, the dominant alternative to plastic grocery bags, are a far more serious environmental concern and are more expensive to produce, besides. In a quick scan of reports by various media outlets, there hasn’t been too much mention of the growing popularity of reusable bags–themselves frequently made from recycled plastic. Plus, in other states where bills have been introduced to ban or tax the use of plastic bags by large retailers, legislators cite economic woes as a reason why consumers just won’t put up with a 5 cent fee for each bag they use at the store. C’est la vie, right?

Not so fast. A number of other places have managed to ban bags altogether. And we’re not just talking San Fransisco, but some bureaucratic behemoths: The BBC reported that at the beginning of 2008, China outlawed the bags, encouraging its citizens to return to more traditional methods of hauling groceries, like baskets and cloth bags. Bangladesh has also banned plastic bags, after studies showed that drainage passageways blocked by the bags were the “main culprits” in severe countrywide flooding in 1988 and 1998.

Another way of discouraging the use of plastic bags is a tax or fee on bags, and one of the longest-running success stories is in Ireland. The 15 cent tax per bag enacted in 2002 has reduced bag use by 90 percent, according to a BBC report. In the first year, the country raised €3.5 million.

For its part, New York state has enacted a law requiring big retailers to recycle their bags, and violators face a fine — a pretty paltry one, at that, slapping big retailers first with a warning, then a $100 fine, then up to a $500 fine for “knowingly and intentionally” violating the law. I’m sure Wal-Mart is shaking in its shoes at the prospect of parting with that kind of money.

Maryland is in on the game, too: Montgomery County state delegate Alfred Carr, Jr. introduced a 5 cent-per-bag tax on every bag–paper and plastic (excepting the tiny plastic ones)–given out by businesses across the state. No word yet on whether it will pass; the state’s General Assembly doesn’t adjourn for another month.

The prospects aren’t looking too good, as jurisdictions are just trying to survive the current recession.

And as a final note, news outlets across the globe have started sounding death knells for the recycling industry: recycled cardboard waste has gone from a high of $135 a ton last September to $35 a ton today. Plastic, which used to fetch 25 cents per pound, now only gets 2 cents a pound. Some municipalities’ recycling programs have even started to restrict the kinds of recyclables they’ll accept: some only take paper, some only plastic. Fox News put together a comprehensive little piece on how this bottoming out is affecting cities and towns across the country.

Oyster Pea Crab

On Monday, my husband and I were over at his parents’ house and he got busy shucking some oysters a friend had dropped off — Eastern oysters, Crassostrea virginica. I was chatting with my father-in-law when my husband started hollering about something from the kitchen, something strange he’d found in the oyster he had just opened.

He comes over and shows us the shell, and there, perched right inside was a very round, very tiny, very translucent crab. Its innards were clearly visible, fluffy-looking red streaks, and we figured it was dead, since it was inside an oyster and the oysters had been in the fridge. We had quite the laugh, thinking about the silly thing crawling into an oyster at a moment when its shell was gaping open. But we were also totally puzzled: my father-in-law was convinced it was a blue crab; my husband thought it to be a fiddler; I had no earthly idea. So we put it into some tap water mixed with alcohol (gin, to be exact, since it was the nearest thing handy on the counter), reckoning that might “preserve” it since I said right away I wanted to take it to a local university to find out what it was.

A few minutes later, I held it up to a window to check it out more clearly. What it was doing, clearly, was moving — very slowly, very sluggishly, obviously dying but still alive nonetheless. So we put it back into fresh water in a small jar (…okay, so it was a pill bottle, since again, it was the nearest small container that was handy), and popped it into the fridge.

The next afternoon, we dropped it off at George Mason University’s biology office. I had to leave a note, since all the faculty were in a meeting, but the grad student at the desk was all, “Wow, cool. Oh, wow. Cool.”

I never expected such a fast reply, but an assistant professor e-mailed me that very evening:

The critter you found was an oyster pea crab (a full grown female). These are quite common, but can surprise the unsuspecting oyster consumer (as you discovered). They live most of their lives with the oyster in its shell. They feed on food particles filtered by the oyster and sometimes on the oyster itself.

Thanks for sharing it. We will make it part of the collection for our invertebrate zoology class.

Wow, indeed!

Chinese mitten crab

I was relieved that it was this kind of crab, unsettling as it was to find it inside an oyster, and not another species I’d come across in my Google crab research: the Chinese mitten crab (Eriocheir sinensis), so named for its furry pincers.

Though they’re non-native, it seems that they are not yet what you’d call widespread: as of February 2008, the Smithsonian’s Marine Invasions Research Lab had reported only 13 individuals captured from the Chesapeake Bay, along with a number of others along the coast in New Jersey, New York and in various places in the Great Lakes, where they are believed to have originated through release of ships’ ballast water there. But, according to the USGS, a lone female can lay up to 1 million eggs at one time:

Mitten crabs spend most of their time in fresh water but move to brackish water to reproduce (at least 26 ppt). Their primary food is aquatic vegetation, but will also feed on mollusks, fish, and other crabs. Mature adults are 38-50 mm in carapace width. A female can lay up to 1 million eggs in a one event. One effect of the mitten crab could be the collapse of support structures following successive years of mitten crab burrowing (Ingle, 1986). In the Far East, mitten crabs are an intermediate hosts of lungflukes, Paragonimus ringeri, which occur in humans (Ingle, 1986)

The USGS adds that where it has occurred in California, the mitten crab has become troublesome because of its tendency to congregate around water pumping facilities’ intake pipes.

One way to approach thinking about invasives–along with other elements of environmental change, whether or not you generally agree with it–is this: risk management. (Thanks to my brother for this idea; I read an old post of his several days ago that mentioned risk management.) What are the risks of non-native species introductions–to humans, to native flora and fauna, to infrastructure, to the economy?

I’ll wrap this up by saying that I was on my way to try and find an easy-to-summarize, negative economic example of invasives, but got sidetracked by what looks to be a really interesting news website: Sightline Daily.

Mirant's coal-fired Dickerson plant, on the Potomac River in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Curling up with the summary of the 2010 federal budget isn’t exactly cozy Saturday morning reading, but today I took a crack at it. While there are several items of note (including the drastically reduced usage of the word “terrorism” compared with the last several editions), one budget item in particular caught my attention: climate revenue.

As far as I can discern without actually calling up a human being to ask, the “climate revenue” line item refers to money that is expected to be generated by a proposal to implement a nationwide carbon cap-and-trade system. Note: for those of you who click on the link, sorry about the tiny print, but the reference is on page 3 of the table. Blame the Government Printing Office!

The kicker: it’s expected to haul in $646 billion over the first decade of its existence. This is a brand-new, novel source of revenue, something never before seen in a federal government budget. The idea quite literally is to make money out of vapors.

The national plan consists of other elements designed to reduce the country’s carbon output–notably, forms of “carbon sequestration”, where CO2 is injected through various means into subterranean reservoirs, coal mine seams, and under-ocean saline reservoirs.  The U.S. Energy Department even has a searchable function for descriptions of ongoing sequestration research projects in your own home state! But the cap-and-trade idea is the crown jewel in the Obama administration’s efforts to effect change on emissions impacts.

The idea is pretty simple: CO2 emitters are allowed a certain tonnage of emissions (a “cap”) after which they must buy credits to account for the excess. Producers of CO2, say a coal-fired power plant, buy credits at a rate determined through an auction. The power plant can then freely “use” its credits, each of which corresponds to one ton of emitted carbon dioxide. If the power plant exceeds its allocation of credits, it can be fined, or have restrictions placed on the number of credits it can buy in subsequent years (leading to compounded fines.)

Trading comes into play when companies with extra credits–this might include companies which have voluntarily reduced emissions or implemented new, cleaner technologies–swap or sell them to bigger producers in need of more credits to cover their emission volumes. Over time, both the cap and available credits are reduced. With fewer credits to go around, companies have a real economic incentive to work to reduce emissions. Check out a couple of cute illustrations by the jolly folks at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in its “cap-and-trade primer“.

Meanwhile, all the money generated through these carbon credit “auctions” goes back into government coffers, and is used to fund energy technology research, home weatherization, power grid modernization, or offset resulting electric rate increases.  A study (hefty PDF here) by researchers at the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Environmental Research suggests that the average consumer’s power bill shouldn’t increase for several reasons. Higher hourly rates will lead to lower demand for power, and a state’s re-investment of its auction revenue into energy efficiency programs will reduce the overall amount of energy required. A little mind-bending, but there it is.

Now, there already exists what amounts to a pilot cap-and-trade program: the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a collection of Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states working together on a regional emissions goal. Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont held the first auctions of their credit allocations last year: The Washington Post reported in a Sept. 30, 2008 story that the first auction raised nearly $40 million for the member states.

Maryland’s laws mandate the state use auction revenue to:

…support energy efficiency, directly mitigate electricity ratepayer impacts, promote renewable or non-carbon emitting energy technologies, stimulate or reward investment in the development of innovative carbon emissions abatement technologies with significant carbon reduction potential, and administer these regulations. (Maryland State Carbon Trading Regulations)

The second RGGI auction in mid-December was slightly more successful, raising $106.5 million. The third auction is slated for March 18, 2009.

RGGI member states’ CO2 emitters paid, on average, around $3 per carbon-ton unit for each credit. The federal program, by comparison, intends to start carbon credit prices at around $15 per ton. Experts say the goal of $646 billion is not unreasonable: see this Feb. 26, 2009 story by Reuters for more. RGGI’s critics said it set its emission cap too high and its credit prices too low, but the cooperative said it was done that way intentionally to ease participants into the credit-buying process. (Similar cap-and-trade methods were employed to phase out leaded gasoline in 1973 and CFCs in the 1990s, for example.)

Compliance rules for each state went into effect on Jan. 1, 2009. I researched Maryland’s rules for participation in RGGI to get an idea of how it will work there, since it’s the nearest participating state to Virginia.

The initial annual allocation of carbon credits RGGI is doling out totals 188.1 million tons, and Maryland’s 2009-2014 chunk of that equals 37.5 million tons. Every year after 2014, each state’s credit allocation will be reduced by 2.5%. In Maryland, any coal, oil or gas power plant with a capacity of 25 megawatts or more is required to participate, and must buy credits. In Maryland, that affects 16 plants, which can swap, sell, or save credits for future years if they don’t use everything in one calendar year. There are also a number of exemption rules, allowing producers extra flexibility for contributing to other mitigation programs, such as marshland and forest restoration. By participating in the RGGI, Maryland aims to reduce its emissions to pre-2006 levels by 90% in the year 2050.

The federal goals, by contrast, are laid out in the relevant 2010 budget section:

After enactment of the Budget, the Administration will work expeditiously with key stakeholders and the Congress to develop an economy-wide emissions reduction program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions approximately 14 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and approximately 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

Final thought: I wonder if there are any estimates of the job creation associated with research and development for carbon sequestration, scrubbing technologies, and other mitigation technologies? This is only one sector!

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An update today on an arresting news topic equates Virginia’s plan to introduce Asian oysters to the Chesapeake Bay with a kudzu infestation. But there’s enough resistance to the plan by virtually every agency involved, except Virginia itself, that even the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is threatening to take the issue all the way to the White House.

Virginia’s stake in this is not small. According to a Dec. 2008 U.S. Department of Commerce report, Virginia’s shellfish industry is the 8th largest in the nation, equating to an annual value of $40.9 million as of 2003. As the demand for hard clams and oysters grow, Virginia is positioned to make a lot of money from encouraging shellfish farming. Here’s a link to the NOAA website about the project.

Shellfish farms want the Asian oyster in the Bay so they can keep up with demand for seafood. The proposal assures that the oysters are supposed to be chemically sterilized, but Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold wrote in a Feb. 15, 2009 story that “once an animal that can lay 10,000,000 eggs is set loose, it’s loose.”

Maryland doesn’t want anything to do with it. Neither does the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writing in a Dec. 15, 2008 memo that the only oyster to be put into the bay should be the native Virginia oyster.

We believe the Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (DPEIS) underemphasizes the potential effects on the native Eastern oyster population. The implied premise of the DPEIS is that the native Eastern oyster will not increase in area and numbers sufficient to meet the objective of sustaining an oyster population similar to what was present during the 1920-1970 time period under any of the proposed scenarios. The lead agencies believe that the proposed action is needed to meet the functional needs of the Chesapeake Bay in terms of maintaining reef structure and filtering capacity.

However, the Department values native Eastern oysters as a keystone aquatic species [emphasis added] that represents the health of the aquatic environment and many other aquatic species in the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic coast. Based upon the research and modeling documented in the DPEIS, we believe that there is great potential for the non-native Suminoe oyster to outcompete the native Eastern oyster.

The Army Corps of Engineers colonel in charge of the decision, Col. Dionysios Anninos (who approved test programs of the Asian oyster in Virginia’s Chesapeake tributaries) has delayed making a final decision on the matter for several weeks. A Feb. 23, 2009 blog post in the Baltimore Sun describes Anninos as conflicted:

“Anninos, who has permitted Virginia seafood businesses to experiment with raising batches of the sterilized Asian oysters, has said he’s on the fence.   He said in a telephone interview Monday that he needs a few weeks yet to take a closer look at estimates of the risk that the sterile Asian oysters might “revert” while in the bay and recover their ability to reproduce. “

The counterpoint to this is that the Asian oysters may also succumb to the protozoan menaces that are killing off the current oyster population, and that the whole project would be a waste of money anyway.

The fears are not unfounded. Take, for example, the tiny zebra mussel, which is suspected to have arrived in the Great Lakes as a stowaway in ships’ ballast, and discovered there in 1988. In only 20 years, the zebra mussel has expanded its North American range into most major riverways of the eastern United States, is creeping westward, and does a great job of clogging up everything it colonizes.

Not only does it gum up the waters, but it also outcompetes other organisms for food. From a USGS factsheet on the zebra mussel infestation:

Effects may continue through the food web to fish. Reductions in zooplankton biomass may cause increased competition, decreased survival and decreased biomass of planktivorous fish.

So if the little zebra mussel is such an efficient feeder, out-competing nearly everything else in their environment for food and space to live, might the Asian oyster not have a similar effect on the Chesapeake Bay? Sure, there would be plenty of oysters for anyone who wants to eat them. But given the typical North American success of Asian species of animals as well as plants (consider bamboo, purple loosestrife, kudzu, and water hyacinth), it’s not such a stretch to suggest that if the Asian oyster succeeds in escaping from cultivation pens, it wouldn’t be long before it’s the dominant organism in the Bay.

There is the argument that efficient Asian filter feeders could work wonders in improving the water clarity of the Chesapeake, as well as providing abundant shellfish for the industry. But say, for example, Asian oysters are as good as their mussel counterparts in filtering everything out of the water, it also may mean their uptake of toxins and other heavy metals is just as efficient, then what’s the point in eating them? It’s the equivalent of eating a sponge soaked in mercury, in my mind.

One last note on the zebra mussel and other ships’ ballast issues: the AP reports that the EPA is considering new regulations for ballast permits, so we’ll see what comes of that.