New York — Polly is a 10-year-old Holstein cow, the oldest in a herd of about 300 on the Bar-Way Farm in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Together they produce 7,600of milk each day. They also make enough poop to fill about two garbage trucks. The farm makes money from both.
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.
“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.” Over the years, RNG has had an uneasy relationship with the fossil fuel industry, much as solar and wind have clashed with traditional utilities. It’s also a tougher sell as an investment. A typical RNG project costs about $17m but can top out as high as $100m, according to industry lobbying group RNG Coalition. That’s compared with the $6m to $8.5m price tag for an Appalachian gas well, which can also pump many times more gas in a day than a digester can produce, according to BloombergNEF.
California is by far the biggest market for RNG, but others are coming up. Over the summer, Oregon finalised rules that will allow utilities to supply as much as 30% of gas customers with RNG by 2050, and several other states are considering paying fees to those adding RNG to the grid, similar to existing credits for wind and solar power.