Missouri produces scarce natural gas unless you count the pigs.
The methane that floats out of the manure ponds at pig farms across the state is increasingly being piped and delivered to power stations and homes, where it is burned along with shale gas for heat, hot showers and cooking.
Smithfield Foods Inc., the country’s largest pork producer, expects to sell gas from all of its Missouri farms by the summer. Most of its farms already import methane into the gas network. After the lids in the rest were stretched over the four-acre lagoon and then connected to equipment that removes carbon dioxide and impurities from the fumes, Smithfield expects to supply enough gas in Missouri to replenish about 10,000 homes.
“We’ve been looking at making energy from manure for decades,” says Kraig Westerbeek, who leads Smithfield’s renewable energy industry. “We’ve had a few failures, but these projects show that you can do it.”
Kraig Westerbeek investigates a Smithfield farm in northern Missouri.
Businesses’ urgency to commit themselves to reducing greenhouse gases makes a big business out of using the methane that leaks from heaps of organic waste. So-called renewable natural gas can be produced in commercial quantities at pig and dairy farms, landfills, wastewater treatment facilities and from spoiled food and sludge.
Burning it to generate electricity or heat produces no less carbon dioxide than shale gas. But methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The emission of methane from the atmosphere and into the energy grid is treated as a reduction in emissions and rewarded with valuable credits with low carbon and renewable fuels, which can be traded with or separately from the gas.
Gas from landfills, farms, sewage plants, food waste and other anaerobic digestive systems make up less than 1% of the US natural gas supply. The market is overloaded with so much shale gas that many oil rigs simply burn their once valuable by-product – what they call “garbage gas” – at the well, rather than spending money to bring it to market. On Monday, the futures contracts of natural gas traded at $ 2.27 per million British thermal units, a meager winter price that falls below the break-even point for many producers.
Gas from the actual rubbish usually costs many times more. It cannot compete with shale gas without subsidies such as fuel credits and its beneficial effect on mathematics for corporate emissions.
Analysts and utilities believe that renewable natural gas could reach 10 to 30% of the total natural gas supply by 2040. The bottom line of the series still needs the help of policymakers, the deep pockets of the energy industry and companies eager to burn their environmental credentials. for the funds that send trillions of dollars for environmental and social responsibility.
On a Smithfield farm in northern Missouri, pools of manure are covered to capture biogas.
Pipeline companies and utilities are the key to a boom in biogas. It is too expensive for most farmers to connect dams to pipelines, but it is the daily undertaking of energy industries to connect the remote gas sources to the market. Unlike the electricity networks, pipeline owners do not have wind and solar power to appeal to ESG investors or to divert skepticism about the value of pipelines in a green energy economy.
“Renewable natural gas is something green for them to talk about,” said RBC Capital Markets analyst TJ Schultz. ‘The advantage for them is that it fits into their existing infrastructure. They do not have to make changes. ”
RBC estimates that commercial quantities of gas can be produced at more than 2,500 U.S. landfills, the most fertile sources, and about 8,000 farms, providing the most valuable credits because they are the strongest polluters.
The U.S. Biogas Board struggled three years ago to reach utilities, said Patrick Serfass, executive director of the advocacy group. This was before so many companies promised carbon neutrality and ESG funds had such an impact.
“Now the gas suppliers are coming to us to ask how they can get their hands on renewable natural gas and to have more systems built to increase their gas source and increase their pipelines,” he said. Serfass said.
Dominion Energy Inc.,
a major utility industry striving for carbon neutrality by 2050 plans to invest $ 2 billion in biogas projects. It has a $ 200 million contract to install it on dairy farms, and he is aiming for another $ 500 million with Smithfield, separate from the Missouri pork producer.
Pipelines carry raw biogas to a processing center on a Smithfield farm.
The partnership’s first project collects gas from 26 pig farms in the Escalante Desert in Utah. The gas is flowing to a pipeline between Wyoming’s gas fields and Bakersfield, California, and the pigs are expected to heat about 3,000 homes.
Dominion and Smithfield, the latter of which aims to eliminate more emissions by 2030 than are produced in U.S. real estate, have other projects planned or underway in Arizona, California, Virginia and North Carolina, where millions of pigs annually Be mixed. “Southeast North Carolina has the potential to be one of the leading regions for natural gas production,” said Ryan Childress, director of gas business development.
Sempra Energiesay
SoCalGas, the country’s largest gas supplier, works with dairy farmers and says 20% of the gas will come from waste by 2030. California regulators recently said the Los Angeles utility could charge extra for customers who want biogas.
Duke Energy Corp.
says he has a five-year plan to be a leader in renewable natural gas. Chevron Corp.
committed more than $ 200 million. Williams Cos. CEO Alan Armstrong told investors that the firm, which carries nearly one-third of all U.S. gas in its pipelines, is in a position to exchange fossil fuels to reduce emissions.
King of Prussia, UGI of Dad Corp.
sold its stake in a coal-fired power station across the state. It bought a company that trades in California’s renewable gas credit markets and invests in an Idaho dairy gas project. UGI CEO David Lindenmuth said at an online biogas conference this month that the gas distribution company is following the lead of its European businesses.
“Utilities out there have figured out how to stay relevant,” he said. “Maintain the invested infrastructure, but also talk about how they can be a partner in reducing greenhouse gases and not be singled out by environmentalists.”
Hog sheds sit next to a canvas-covered lagoon on a Smithfield farm. The pigs’ waste flows to the lagoon, where it decomposes and produces biogas.
Write to Ryan December by [email protected]
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