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posted by janrinok on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the belching-all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Manure, trash and wastewater: U.S. utilities get dirty in climate fight

Joey Airoso has always been proud of his cows, whose milk goes into the butter sold by national dairy company Land O’Lakes. Now he has something new to brag about: the vast amounts of gas produced by his 2,900-head herd is powering truck fleets, homes and factories across the state of California.

“It’s pretty incredible if you think about it,” Airoso said during a recent tour of his 1,500-acre (607-hectare) farm, as a stream of watered-down manure flowed from cow sheds into a nearby pit. There the slurry releases methane that is captured and eventually piped into fueling stations and buildings.

Airoso is tapping into a growing market among U.S. utilities for so-called renewable natural gas, or biomethane, that is being driven by the fight against climate change.

For farmers, it is a way to get ahead of a wave of greenhouse gas regulation and make a bit of cash at the same time. And for utilities that buy or transport the gas, it is a way to respond to the increasing demands of customers and lawmakers to cut their reliance on fossil fuels.

“It is not something very many people are aware of yet, but it makes sense once it’s explained,” said Emily O’Connell, director of energy markets policy at the American Gas Association, the trade group for gas utilities.

Renewable natural gas can come from manure, landfills or wastewater and is interchangeable with gas drilled out of the ground. It cuts greenhouse gas emissions by ensuring significant volumes of methane, that would have been produced anyway, never reach the atmosphere. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide when it escapes into the air unburned.

Nationwide, more than a dozen utilities have started developing renewable natural gas production through partnerships with farmers, wastewater treatment plants and landfill operators, while nine have proposed price premiums for customers who choose it as a fuel, according to the American Gas Association. Renewable natural gas is currently between four and seven times more expensive to produce than fossil gas, a gap that its proponents hope will narrow as the fuel becomes more widely used.


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:53PM (5 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:53PM (#919456) Journal

    That's not true for volcanoes, at least. Or rather, it depends a lot on which year you measure. Last I checked there were years in which volcanoes emitted more CO2 than humans. But that isn't really the point. Volcanoes would do that whether people were around or not...and most years they're relatively low. And it's the cumulative net that significant. Volcanoes, etc., and plants were pretty much in balance before we started putting fossil Carbon into the atmosphere.

    That said, if you can figure an economic way to capture and secure volcano CO2, it would be a big help. Beavers create short term surplus methane, but also bury lots of wood that is on it's way to being coal. So they are also engaging in carbon capture.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:04PM (1 child)

    by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:04PM (#919462)

    Care to offer a citation for that claim? Volcanic activity averages about 1 billion tons of CO2 per year compared to 40 billion tons from fossil fuel use.

    There are times - during large eruptions/outgassings that volcanoes are releasing CO2 faster than the global human community - but those periods last hours or days, not years.

    At least not within modern human history - there have been times in the distant (pre-humanity) past when volcanic emissions dwarfed modern human activity over the course of years - and those are mostly associated with major environmental changes and global extinction events.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:46PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:46PM (#919477) Journal

      No, I can't offer a citation, and I believe you are correct for recent decades. I believe there was a time in the 1800's (I'd need to check to be more specific about the date) when there was a day where the CO2 emissions were greater than the current human emissions, and there have been periods where that was true for at least months...but not in recent centuries, and possibly not in recent millennia. (I don't *think* I'd need to go back to the Deccan Traps, but maybe.)

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:13PM (2 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:13PM (#919467)

    Hit submit too soon...
    >That said, if you can figure an economic way to capture and secure volcano CO2, it would be a big help.
    Not really - it would be about 1% help - useful if it were cheap enough suppose, but *way* down the list of helpful technologies.

    >Beavers create short term surplus methane, but also bury lots of wood that is on it's way to being coal.

    Umm, no. You're right that they do also help sequester carbon (and spread water around to encourage ecosystems that further sequester carbon). But there won't be any more coal being made - coal is the result of a ~80million year anomaly between the evolution of the complex molecules that are the basis of woody plants, and the evolution of the first organisms capable of digesting those molecules. Now that those organisms exist, short of dumping wood into a tar pit, you're not going to keep it from being eaten. It may be eaten quickly in an oxygen rich environment, or eaten slowly in an oxygen poor environment (such as underwater), but it will be eaten. Rot lives everywhere.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:50PM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:50PM (#919481) Journal

      When I looked up "anaerobic lignin digestion" I got a bunch of links that all seemed to indicate that special conditions were required for that to happen. Are you sure that coal isn't being currently produced?

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      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:18AM

        by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:18AM (#919671)

        Do you know how difficult it is to create and maintain anaerobic conditions for a century, much less for millions of years? Submerging in water won't do it - water is generally saturated with oxygen. As is most every other environment. The Earth's crust is 47% oxygen by mass - most of that is admittedly tied up in mineral form, but free oxygen gets pretty much everywhere near the surface. Certainly everywhere that insects or other animals live... which is pretty much everywhere.

        That said - no, I'm not sure that no coal is currently being produced, some probably is. But I'm pretty certain that negligible coal is being produced. Otherwise the "coal boundary" wouldn't be so clearly defined all over the planet.