Your Thanksgiving turkey, by Christmas, is probably just a distant, if fondly-recalled, memory.

But, if Changing World Technologies of Carthage, Missouri has anything to say about it, turkeys will, as alternative energy providers, feed our needs well beyond the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Changing World operates, next to the Carthage Butterball processing plant, a $31 million dollar “biomass” factory, which converts the parts of the turkey that don’t make it to the supermarkets into–yes, really–alternative energy oil and gas.

The biomass plant, in a process called “thermal depolymerization”, operates by combining, each day, up to 250 tons of Butterball’s leftovers with discarded restaurant grease and water, and subjecting the mix to air pressures up to 600 pounds per square inch, and temperatures between 500 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The result? Quality alternative energy oils and gasses.

And the amounts of oils and gasses are not insignificant. From one thousand pounds of waste, the plant extracts 300 pounds of alternative energy petroleum, which can be used in manufacturing, 50 pounds of propane, butane, or methane, some of which the plant burns to provide its own alternative energy electricity, and 30 pounds of solid by-products which make an acceptable fertilizer. And there are no environmental concerns; the only residue remaining is distilled water.

The technology is so promising that the plant’s construction was funded, in part, by the Federal Government, as part of the Bush Administration’s alternative energy agenda.

And it has received private sector support, as well. Both Con-Agra, Butterball’s parent company, and Howard Buffet, son of financier Warren Buffet, have invested in the technology.

The only setback so far is that CWT had to temporarily close the Carthage plant between December 2005 and March 2006, in order to address complaints that its process was creating offensive odors. The complaints have now been dropped.

And in January of 2006, under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the alternative energy “renewable” diesel oil from CWT qualified for a subsidy of $1 per gallon–and, finally, the technology became profitable.

We may have to be thankful for turkeys all year long.