A Bend company is developing a plan for a high-tech rendering and biofuel plant in Crook County that could bring up to 150 jobs to the area, cut costs for butchers and put a stop to the trucking of thousands of pounds of local animal carcasses to an out-of-state facility.

In October 2006, Redmond Tallow, Oregon’s last operating meat rendering plant, closed its doors. Since then, local butchers, farmers and hunters have had to drop off their dead animals and animal byproducts at the Crook County Landfill.

In October, the county began shipping the materials to Darling International’s Tacoma, Wash., rendering plant twice a week and refrigerating the waste in between pick-ups. It’s a costly process: According to a report prepared for the state Department of Agriculture in September, disposal costs have increased by up to 50 percent across the state since the plant closed.

But Jim Gordon, one of the directors of Earth by Design, said his company’s plan could provide a long-term, environmentally friendly solution to the problem.

The group is proposing an approximately 100-acre development northwest of the Crook County Landfill in Prineville that he said could bring up to 150 jobs to the area.

“Crook County and the whole state of Oregon has been in a real bind not having collection areas other than landfills,” Gordon said. “We’ve been working on this for quite some time. It’s really different than a typical rendering plant — we’re trying to do a continuous feed process to create bio-gas and a byproduct that would be biodiesel.”

A large part of the plant would be underground and the smell sometimes associated with rendering plants would be minimized by a continuous processing system, Gordon said. The waste material would be placed in closed concrete or steel holding tanks, where it would be broken down through a chemical process. Once the waste was “digested,” it would be used to make alternative energy products.

“It’s sealed so it doesn’t allow for any of those things to come out in the air,” he said. “We’re working with Oregon State University’s chemical engineering department and also the OSU Ag Extension.”

Gordon said the planning is still in the early stages, but he’s already presented his ideas to the Crook County Court, the state Department of Agriculture and several other interested groups. Though the proposed facility would take animal carcasses, he said it would also be designed for other types of waste disposal and could potentially be incorporated into Prineville’s sewage treatment system.

He said the location was chosen because of its distance from residential areas and accessibility by road and potentially by rail. Dan Lovelady, the general manager of the City of Prineville Railway, said he has already spoken with members of the Earth by Design group about the project and about the possibility of extending the railway to the proposed southwest Prineville location.

“Our hope is that eventually their business will be large enough that they will be able to secure their product for creating energy at their plant from sources other than the area, and if that happens, we will be able to bring that product in by rail,” Lovelady said. “Six or seven miles of additional rail would be needed if that happened.”

Bobbi Riggs, a livestock agent with the OSU Extension Service, said local producers are ready to see a local solution to the increasing cost of transporting their carcasses and animal byproducts. She sad she is supportive of the plan to use the material to create energy, rather than letting it go to waste.

“Our concern is we don’t want to see carcasses being dumped on public land, we don’t want to see people burying their animals improperly close to water sources,” she said. “If there was another option, hopefully we could keep that from happening.”

Gordon and his team are working on business and development plans with the Department of Agriculture’s Ag Development and Marketing Division, which could help provide funding for the project as it progresses, said Jerry Gardner, the division’s business development manager. And in Crook County, officials are putting together a committee that will consider the plan and its location in the next few months, though a firm timeline has not been set for the project.

“The next conversation would need to be around the specifics, some kind of land agreements,” said Crook County Judge Scott Cooper. “The heavy lifting of trying to hammer out an agreement would be the next step, and then we’d have to put it up for consideration for a vote … we continue to be interested in a private-sector solution.”