Trucks running on the runs

user-gravatar Headshot
Updated Dec 14, 2009

Is that manure I smell or is your DPF on the fritz?br /br /At the World Agricultural Fair last week, reps of Hilarides Dairy announced that the company is converting cow waste to fuel generators and, you guessed it, big trucks. Rob Hilarides, a fourth-generation dairy farmer and the firm’s owner, earned a $600,000 grant from the California Air Resources Board’s Alternative Fuel Incentive Program along the way to realizing the current situation: two heavy-duty diesel trucks that run entirely on biomethane gas.br /br /The cattle waste, corraled in covered lagoons on Hilarides’ Lindsay, Calif., dairy farm, is run through an “anaerobic-lagoon digester,” according to CARB, that “processes the run-off of nearly 10,000 cows,” generating 226,000 cubic feet of biomethane daily, more than enough to run the two trucks making daily runs and generators. The dairy’s diesel consumption is down 650 gallons a day. “Rob intends to convert five pick-up trucks to use the same fuel,” CARB says.br /br /More on the project a href=”http://www.terrapass.com/projects/details/hilarides-dairy.html”here/a.div class=”blogger-post-footer”Channel 19 is the blog version of the column of the same name featured in Overdrive: The Voice of the American Trucker. Todd Dills ([email protected]) is its author./div