A St Louis company hopes to convert the nearly intolerable odor of pork farming into the sweet smell of success.

Roeslein Alternative Energy and Smithfield hope to change manure into methane into money.

The companies’ $120 million initiative in Albany, Missouri enters phase two this week.

Impermeable synthetic covers are now installed on nearly half of the 88 existing manure lagoons at nine Smithfield farms in Northern Missouri, capturing methane from one of the largest concentrations of finishing hogs in the Midwest. The covers turn the lagoons into anaerobic digesters that produce a lot of biogas. Up until now, that biogas has been flared.

Phase II of the project will see equipment installed to remove impurities from the biogas to create pipeline-quality natural gas. A new interconnection being installed at the farm will take that gas to the national pipeline grid. Duke Energy in North Carolina has agreed to purchase a portion of the RNG to help meet clean energy requirements for power generation.

When the project is complete several hundred million cubic feet of RNG will be available for similar transmission each year.

Officials with the companies launch the new phase of the project on Wednesday under tight security at farm near Albany.