Big Oil and Big Ag are teaming up to turn cow poop into energy — and profits. The math doesn’t add up.
Big Oil and Big Ag are teaming up to turn cow poop into energy — and profits. The math doesn’t add up.
US climate policy has led to a surge in manure-based “biogas.” Critics say it’s propping up factory farming.
There have been studies of manure reactors here in Norway as well, including some really small-scale ones, like the Telemark reactor.
As long as they have animals, getting the manure through the reactor will
- capture methane for use as biogas rather than letting it straight into the atmosphere,
- let that biogas supplant fossil gas ("natural" gas), i.e. rather than free stored carbon it has gone in a loop
- reduce the viability of weeds in the manure, and
- increase the nitrogen availability in the manure, bringing it closer to fossil gas-derived artificial fertilizer in potency.
Biogas reactors are a serious harm reduction win in modern agriculture and reduces reliance on fossil fuels in several ways.
Here it seems like Vox is just peddling "big oil and big ag are in favor, therefore it's sus". Blind hens like those two also sometimes find corn.
https://agdatanews.substack.com/p/the-value-of-methane-from-cow-manure
is the cost/benefit source. It does say that with a price on methane emissions based on GWP100(year) that it is economic, even though with no price on methane emissions it is a 90% loss.
Taxing food emissions is troublesome. Cattle especially, and livestock in general, are high emitters. They are also a food battery. During drought/crop failure, eat them instead. Lab meat's biggest advantage is an escape from climate dependence/resilience.
The American way is somehow subsidies. The right way is taxing emissions. That does make biodigesters profitable, but also makes cow products more expensive. Alternatives to lab meat are goats, sheep, deer, chicken which produce less emissions than cows. There would still be a market for expensive meat, just a smaller one.
GHG Tax proceeds paid as dividends makes food more affordable, even if cow products would be less affordable.
Capturing methane is a good thing. It’s 86 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.The leftover manure is also used as fertilizer. This isn’t greenwashing.
Tying this process exclusively to factory farming seems disingenuous. Cows still produce methane whether on one factory farm or a hundred family owned farms. Factory farming is shitty (pun intended) but capturing methane is still a good thing.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-greenhouse-gas-is-methane/
I have to agree.
Just to pile on about the operation of factory farms. They often use a substrate like sand, which picks up the manure/urine, but then is rinsed out to reuse the substrate. This manure slurry is held in ponds and often just dumped on neighboring farms with little care to whether upcoming rains wash the slurry into waterways or overburden the capacity of soils to filter ecoli and other fun stuff before it hits the neighbors' drinking water wells.
Running this through a digester really helps so much from an environmental point of view.
Otherwise it's really a shame about the life these factory farms animals live.