EUREKA — For now and into the foreseeable future, a portion of the road leading to Six Flags St. Louis will be paved with a lot more than good intentions.
It will be covered as well with serendipity, ingenuity, creative persistence and … recycled swine manure.
All that ingenuity has gone into a project believed to have created the first asphalt ever produced from the stuff. And one thing’s for sure:
The witnesses lining the bright stretch of North Outer Drive along Interstate 44 — particularly those with noses and an abiding interest in sustainable technology — won’t soon forget the moment the red dump truck deposited a 15-ton load of the designer asphalt into a road paver late Wednesday morning.
"Whew!" gasped a worker with Pace Construction Co., the St. Louis County road contractor that joined forces with Innoventor, the Earth City-based engineering and design firm that perfected the process of converting the animal waste into a bio-oil used in asphalt binder.
To others, the air swelled with the sweet smell of potential for new manufacturing opportunities, jobs and, possibly, profits. How big is that potential? Nobody knows yet.
"If this works out, it’s a win-win situation for everyone," said Karlton Krause, a hog producer from northern Iowa. "For farmers, it produces revenue. And at the same time, it helps clean the environment. We’re taking a waste product and finding a value-added purpose for it."
The road leading to Six Flags, such as it, began 10 years ago when neighbors started raising a stink over the odors at the hog farm operated by Kent Schien’s in-laws in Barry, Ill., east of Hannibal, Mo., about 125 miles from St. Louis.
Schien, Innoventor’s founder and chief executive, is among the legions of former McDonnell Douglas engineers who left the aerospace giant to start their own companies.
A native of Barry himself, Schien understood the pitfalls of alienating the folks next door in a small town where, as likely as not, the neighbors were also cousins, aunts and uncles.
He turned the problem over to his engineers, who soon developed a technique to "scrub" animal odor as it moved outdoors through fans installed on the outer walls of swine sheds.
Schien was justifiably proud of the company’s accomplishment — until he ran into an acquaintance, also a prominent hog producer. The acquaintance praised the invention for removing the stink. But, he pointed out, an air scrubber is not a revenue generator.
What farmers really needed, he suggested, was an invention capable of turning swine waste — up to 8 pounds of it a day per animal — into a money-maker.
Seeking an answer, Schien returned to his alma mater, the University of Illinois, where an agricultural engineering professor named Yuanhui Zhang was developing a process to transform pig manure into bio-oil.
About three years ago, Schien wedded Zhang’s research with the Innoventor team and put Rick Lux, an engineer with a background in biofuels, in charge of the project.
Lux tackled the mission on two fronts: the former Earth City warehouse space that Innoventor converted into an office, adorned with the names of inventors such as the Wright Brothers and Louis Pasteur. And Rick Rehmeier’s hog farm, outside Augusta, which became an off-site laboratory where the team discovered situations and problems they never expected to encounter.
"I don’t think I ever had a class (in engineering school) that ever covered that," said engineer Gary Winkler, referring to the hog manure pit now integrated into his professional life on line pay day loans.
The objective, Lux understood, was to turn time on its head by compressing the process that created crude oil from decomposed critters that died ages ago.
To reach that goal, the team drew on chemistry, engineering and innate common sense in developing a multiple-stage system that ultimately moved the manure into a reactor, which applies heat and pressure to the waste material.
"Instead of taking 10,000 years, they can (produce bio-oil) in about an hour," said Michael Formica, chief environmental counsel with the National Pork Producers Council.
As Lux and the engineers grappled with the biggest obstacle standing between Innoventor and success — pig hair and dander that constantly "chewed up" grinders and pumps — it seemed they might not be able to improve on Mother Nature’s timeline.
By this winter, though, Innoventor was ready to move to the next phase.
The team got a big boost when tests conducted on the paving material received a passing grade as a "lower-grade asphalt binder" from John Wenzlick, a research engineer with the Missouri Department of Transportation.
And Wednesday morning came the biggest test of all.
The sun was still coming up when Lux pulled into the lot of an asphalt plant operated by Pace Construction in a limestone quarry about six miles from Six Flags, the bed of his Innovator pickup truck loaded with 20 gallons of the bio-oil.
Five hours later, a chute beneath a Pace silo dropped a batch of pig asphalt into the red dump truck operated by Mike Cain of Dittmer, Mo.
As Pace employees shoveled the asphalt into buckets for testing in an on-site lab, Cain asked a reporter to confirm the reason the load was drawing so much attention. He got the confirmation; it was exactly what he thought it was.
He sniffed the air. "Smells nasty," the driver continued. "But I live in the country; I’m used to it."
Within minutes, Cain was backing his truck up to the paver.
In the coming weeks and months, MoDOT and Innoventor intend to keep a close eye on the 500-foot stretch where history, of a kind, was made Wednesday morning. The state will monitor wear and tear on a road subjected to a lot of traffic in the seasons when the amusement park is open for business.
Lux and Innoventor see the earlier blessing by MoDOT as permission to move their work to a larger platform.
"We’ll keep going ahead," he said, as workers tamped down the still-fresh asphalt with rolling machines. "We’ve shown this stuff can be processed at the farm, processed at an asphalt plant and put down on a road."
Other parties will be keeping an eye on what Innoventor has wrought as well.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has an obvious interest in what Glenn Curtis, the chief of wastewater and infrastructure management for the Kansas City field office, calls a "fairly unique concept."
And Formica, with the Pork Producers Council, believes it is important to ascertain whether the value of manure-generated bio-oil offsets the cost the electricity, conventional fuel and other expenses needed to produce the substance.
As for Schien, he is making plans to manufacture the prototype on Rehmeier’s farm for use at hog production facilities across the nation.
The plant, he says, will be located in the place where it all began: Barry, Ill.
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