BOARDMAN (AP) - It may not smell that way, but old tires and cow manure could mean clean energy at Threemile Canyon Farms near this Columbia River town.

Portland-based Northwest Biogas has proposed using the tires and cow manure to make methane on the 93,000-acre dairy farm and wants a permit from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to store waste tires.

The DEQ will hold an informational meeting  at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Boardman City Hall to discuss the waste tire storage permit application for a proposed anaerobic digester.

Northwest Biogas wants to use 40,000 waste tires to help grow micro-organisms in an anaerobic digester. The company would use the waste tires inside a lined and covered digester lagoon. If the facility ceases to operate, Northwest Biogas will have to clean, remove and recycle the tires.

Bruce Lumper is a permit writer with the DEQ's Solid Waste Program out of The Dalles. He told the Pendleton East Oregonian that this will be a new digester and that plans for a previous digester at the farms "never quite penciled out."

Threemile Canyon Farms has 17,000 cows that produce about 120 pounds of waste a day each. Threemile flushes the manure along cement alleys and pipes to a lined lagoon, where it releases methane.

Clean methane, the DEQ said in a news release, offers an alternative to natural gas. Generators also use methane to produce electricity. And using the tires eliminates the potential for tire fires or the breeding of vectors, such as mosquitoes.

Oregon has similar digesters, Lumper said. In 2003, the Port of Tillamook Bay constructed a centralized methane digester to biologically process the manure from 4,000 of Tillamook County's 30,000 dairy cows. He said it is working and producing energy.