Polly is a 10-year-old black-and-white Holstein cow, the oldest in a herd of about 300 on the Bar-Way Farm in Deerfield, Mass. Together they produce 2,000 gallons of milk each day. They also make enough poop to fill about two garbage trucks. The farm makes money off of both. In 2014, Bar-Way began working with Vanguard Renewables to install a biodigester, which uses specialized bacteria to convert organic material—for example, cow poop—into biogas, a versatile fuel. Once it’s purified, this biomethane, also known as renewable natural gas (RNG), is chemically identical to the main ingredient in the fossil-based natural gas that comes out of your stove or heats your water.
Renewable Natural Gas Rises
RNG production over time, in million BTUs per day
Data: Bloomberg NEF
“My grandfather always told me that to be successful, you’ve got to use every asset you have to its fullest,” says Peter Melnik, whose family has owned Bar-Way Farm Inc. for 101 years. He won’t disclose how much he’s profited from the arrangement, but he will say it’s made the business “that much more viable.” “Without a doubt, small family farming in the United States is incredibly tough,” he adds.
“It’s gotten to the point they need a proactive decarbonization strategy,” says Jigar Shah, co-founder of clean energy financier Generate Capital Inc., one of the largest RNG owners in the country. “Natural gas producers now believe their growth prospects are more limited—to the degree that some people said we should be planning for the obsolescence of the natural gas utility.”
That’s where renewable natural gas is supposed to come in. Bovine waste is typically stored in vast open lagoons that emit methane—a greenhouse gas more than 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide over 20 years— making agricultural waste the single biggest contributor to the country’s total methane emissions from human activity. Both biogas and fossil natural gas are mostly methane, and though they burn more cleanly than the megapolluter coal, they still emit carbon dioxide. But by diverting cow poop into biodigesters in the process of making RNG, gas companies argue, the effect is a net climate win. Virginia-based utility giant Dominion Energy Inc. claims that supplying only 4% of its customers with biogas would be enough to offset the emission from its entire gas system.
That’s the type of math that irks Matt Vespa, an attorney for the nonprofit climate litigation group Earthjustice. “Just 4% of the gas needs to be renewable gas, and then all of the sudden you have 100% clean energy,” he says, “requires some shoddy assumptions”—for instance, that all the methane coming out of all those lagoons is inevitable in factory farming. But there are plenty of other ways to solve this problem that don’t extend our reliance on polluting fuels, Vespa says.
To Market, to Market
Estimated RNG prices, by source material
Data: Energy Vision
Earthjustice is far from the only climate organization ringing the alarm bells about RNG. Mark Kresowik, a deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, says RNG is a costly distraction that will only slow the energy industry’s transition away from hydrocarbons. (The Sierra Club has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization created by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and owner of Bloomberg News parent company Bloomberg LP.) “This is the last gasp of the gas industry. They know that electrification is superior,” Kresowik says. “If you go down that dead-end route, it increases the cost to consumers in the long run.”