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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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:13PM (2 children)
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)
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?
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:18AM
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.