Amazing pig-poop poofer

By Mike Masterson

Posted: January 2, 2016 at 2:06 a.m.

           

It made my heart race even faster when I heard that the controversial hog factory our state so wrongheadedly misplaced in the Buffalo National River watershed is testing revolutionary swine-waste-vaporizing equipment.

Just maybe, instead of regularly dumping millions of gallons of the potent raw hog waste on fields around Big Creek, a major tributary of the Buffalo, where it can seep into the subsurface karst terrain, now all that poop might just amazingly poof into thin air.

How glorious is that? Waste in, clean, refreshing air out. Sounds like something we might see out of street magician David Blaine, or munching popcorn with wide eyes in a Las Vegas theater of prestidigitation, don't you think?

Imagine the excitement as a couple of stage hands, to the tune of "Happy Days Are Here Again," roll large wheelbarrows filled with the stuff hogs naturally create and dump it into a whirring metallic machine. Then a magician waves his wands, turns up the heat and presto-chango! Only pleasantly scented breezes flow from a pipe on the opposite side.

That's, in effect, pretty much what the Plasma Energy Group from Port Richey, Fla., insists will happen using "plasma arc pyrolysis" that vaporizes potent waste within a closed-loop system.

The group says its technology was tested in October at Sandy River Farm in Conway County. The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality had people on site during those tests and apparently has received data from Plasma Energy from earlier testing in Florida.

The department says it's still processing the results to determine if C&H Hog Farms will have to obtain an air-quality permit to fire up the super-duper poop-poofer at Mount Judea, according to reporter Emily Walkenhorst. Plasma Energy Group had applied for such a permit in September before the Conway County test.

I'm still a tad unclear about where things stand with all the red tape since the Department of Environmental Quality said it hadn't received all the data from Conway County yet. Yet the equipment apparently already has arrived at C&H for additional testing there. Any information beyond that, well, was pretty much like trying to interview thin air.

Here is what Walkenhorst, who has closely followed the C&H story, reported the other day: "Attempts to reach Plasma Energy Group representatives over the past two weeks have been unsuccessful. The group's website could no longer be found, and the company's phone number was disconnected sometime between Dec. 18 and Dec. 22. However, Florida Department of State Division of Corporations records accessed Dec. 22 indicate the company is still active.

"Jason Henson, co-owner of C&H Hog Farms, did not return voice mails asking about the vaporizing technology or the results of any testing. The equipment was not in use at C&H Farms as of Dec. 18, Department of Environmental Quality Director Becky Keogh said in a letter to the Arkansas Canoe Club, the Ozark Society, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance--four groups who have fought C&H Hog Farms' operation in Mount Judea."

Those groups seem less than impressed with the state's approach, as well as the emerging vaporizing technology.

For instance, Gordon Watkins, who heads the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, said his group knew of the testing at the Sandy River Farm in Conway County Farm before Keogh sent her letter.

But Watkins and others believe the state should not allow testing to go forward in such an environmentally sensitive and valuable area without fully understanding any and all emissions such technology produces. "We found it just unacceptable that ADEQ is letting such an experimental process go forward," he told Walkenhorst.

My thoughts about this hog factory being so grossly misplaced in our state's national treasure in God's Country haven't changed.

So many across our state and even nationally continue to wonder why our agency supposedly dedicated to preserving environmental quality would ever have allowed such a place to set up in the Buffalo National River watershed to begin with.

Randall Mathis, who passed away Monday, told me that during his tenure with what was then the Department of Pollution Control and Ecology, he acted to protect and preserve the Buffalo with a moratorium on allowing animal factories (and the enormous contamination they invariably produce) into that sacred watershed.

But somewhere, sometime, and by someone else's decisions after Mathis departed, that moratorium simply evaporated. I detect the stench of politics, don't you?

No one can explain to public satisfaction why our state has invested hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars and contorted itself into a warm pretzel to protect this factory that so many believe shouldn't be in this location. Why not say "our bad," make the politically connected family than owns it financially whole, then shut it down? What is it that makes the state's investment and the serious risks to the river and environment worthwhile to preserve for the common good?

That includes the need for an astounding, super-duper pig-poop poofer.

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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com.

Editorial on 01/02/