The 'Cousins'

Chapter 97 (Echo) Part 3

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN (ECHO) Part Three

A/N: Follows directly from Chapter 97(E) Part Two

Walt's second bombshell of the evening cooled the growing ardour for the project around the table. Walt smiled benevolently and explained. "The town sits on a spur of a main line running down from the north to here. It can no longer carry enough power fer the town's needs since it's growed some since they put in the line way back in the thirties. That's why we get them power-outs. I ain't no engineer, but it seems logical to me, if you cain't get more power in, you cain't get it out either."

"Where is the nearest major power line where we could build a plant and link up to the network, assuming we did start a model operation here?" Greg's question settled them down into thinking mode. It was Ma who answered.

"That'll be Pisa, little town goin' nowhere since they closed down the railroad linkin' it to Ravenna. It's about thirty miles north and east from here."

"That's a bloody shame," Greg remarked. "We have the resource ready and waiting here in Bamptonville and the nearest power outlet is thirty miles away. There's no way I can see the power company putting in a bigger capacity spur to Bamptonville at a cost of a million bucks a mile for the material and work involved."

"And it ain't so easy to get a big truck into Pisa by road either if you were thinkin' about shiftin' the stuff over Greg." Walt tapped the back of Greg's hand with a finger to give emphasis to his words. "There's a hairpin bend over the river at what they call "Hangin' Tree Junction." You couldn't get anything with more'n six wheels around it; they use the smaller school bus fer the Pisa run fer that very reason."

"Can't they widen the road?"

"Nope, too steep an' unstable. If they tried blastin' up there, it'd likely bring down the whole hillside, divert the river an' close off the road fer keeps."

Wayne hammered the table with his knuckle to bring the meeting back to the business in hand. "We're digressing now. We're not here to talk about opening a plant in Pisa. ...Perhaps we can look at local opportunities for our systems another day. I was telling you about a chicken farmer in Pennsylvania who's using one of our systems, but I must apologise. I was getting ahead of myself. What I hadn't told you is that he's not using a digester to process his feedstock. He's using a gasifier, it's a different anaerobic system and that's the market we're heading into with Fishers. We're bringing gasifiers to chicken farmers."

They sat back to listen.

"Okay. Take any pile of manure and what can you do with it?"

"Bury it"

"Burn it'

"Dump it."

Wayne raised his hands in the air to subdue their comments.

"I can see you're not short of ideas. To permanently get rid of it you have to burn it or rot it down. And there's two ways you can burn or rot it down, one's with oxygen present and the other way is without oxygen. Outside right now the heaps're rotting down in air and their chemistry is changing during the rot-down process. Its elements are mixing with the oxygen in the air and forming those dangerous greenhouse gases we talked about: carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, hydrogen sulphide among others. They're all rising to pollute the atmosphere some more and pay us back with global warming and bad weather in the months and years ahead. That's what scientists call an aerobic system – with oxygen present"

"And methane, you did say they're givin' off methane too."

"And raw methane too, quite right Walt."