Turning Manure into Money

by Jim Morrison (Washington Post) When Randy Jordan, a fifth-generation dairy farmer in central Massachusetts, looked into turning manure from his 300 cows into natural gas more than a decade ago, he just wanted to find a way to lower his increasingly painful electric bill.

He knew that biodigesters, a sort of modern alchemy that transforms poop into profits, had been around for decades. But many of the tanks, where microorganisms digest manure and turn it into methane gas that can be burned as fuel or converted to electricity, had been abandoned. They proved too complicated to manage. “It was challenging,” he remembered, “and the money didn’t work.”

Jorgenson told Jordan that while 87 percent of the digesters in the country had failed, he had a new recipe for success: add food waste to the manure. It would increase the energy output and boost the income for farmers through tipping fees from manufacturers, retailers and others looking to unload food waste. Best of all, it would use methane from the manure, instead of venting it into the atmosphere to contribute to climate change.

Along with four other farmers, they formed AGreen Energy LLC and began operating on five farms.

By 2014, after three of the farmers dropped out and sold their shares to Jordan, the project smelled just right to Vanguard Renewables, a start-up that saw the technology’s promise with the addition of food waste. The companies merged. Vanguard soon raised $72 million in venture capital and began financing biodigesting partnerships with other New England dairy farms.

That caught the fancy of Dominion Energy, which is now investing more than $200 million to join with Vanguard to capture manure methane from dairy farms in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Georgia and Nevada and convert it into natural gas.

The typical cost to construct a biodigester and the accompanying facility to clean the natural gas for a farm with 5,000 cows is about $15 million, according to Kevin Chase, co-founder and chief investment officer of Vanguard.

But processing methane from farms into natural gas helps reduce the carbon footprint for companies such as Dominion, which has pledged to reach net zero emissions from methane and carbon dioxide by 2050.

The World Wildlife Fund’s director of dairy, Sandra Vijn, said methane is “an important transition fuel” and is more sustainable than drilling for natural gas.

“There are many industrial processes that require very high temperatures that currently can only be achieved by burning gas,” she said. “And biogas can be a viable alternative until carbon-free options are technologically and economically feasible.”

But Mark Kresowik, the eastern district deputy director at the Sierra Club, the national environmental organization, said zero-emissions electricity from renewable sources such as wind or solar is the best choice.

“When you move methane through pipes and into homes, you still have the same climate and health impacts of transporting, leaking and burning gas,” he said. “It doesn’t eliminate any pollution. It’s simply changing the source of that pollution from drilling to capturing it in this other fashion.”

Rebecca Larson, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin, has studied the climate effects of agriculture and the biological processes that take place when microorganisms break apart manure.

“The benefits of digesting manure are significant,” she said. It not only reduces greenhouse gases, but the high temperatures dampen the odors associated with manure and decrease potential pathogens that can enter the watershed. One study Larson co-wrote concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from a dairy farm can be reduced by 35 percent overall when biogas-based electricity replaces grid-based electricity. The problem for farmers, she said, has been the cost. READ MORE