Insane with Methane

 

There’s lots of angst being generated from Germany’s heavy reliance on natural gas supplied through Russian pipelines. The United States is one of the world’s leading producers of natural gas. Getting our gas to Germany… well, we are way short of the number of tankers it would take to make that feasible. 

Those of us who have gas heaters or use gas-fired cooktops and ovens or dryers are mostly using natural gas. It’s normally odorless, but they add a distinct odor to consumers who use it to detect leaks. The largest component of natural gas is methane, a compound with one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms (CH 4). And methane is one of those lovely fossil fuels, which are the mostly the product of millennia of compressed organic matter, decomposing plants and animals, found deep within the earth. Or in frozen tundra (permafrost), until something melts that ground cover, releasing methane into the atmosphere. Or in the digestive tracts and manure of animals, particularly large lumbering cows.

Even though we sell it, harvest it, pull it out of the ground, methane is a very big and bad component of greenhouse gas if it is released in its purely gaseous form. While the carbon dioxide component of atmospherically trapped greenhouse gas is by far the largest component, methane has, over the years, increased more disproportionately. Methane does break down faster than carbon dioxide – that takes about a decade – but it is also 24 times heavier than carbon dioxide. The good news, however, is that if you manage to capture methane and use it as fuel, it burns far cleaner than either coal or petroleum products. Thus, natural gas has become what many believe is a transitional fuel until we can shift entirely off carbon-based products.

So, cow gas is big business these days. We politely include this effluent into our generic category of “biofuel.” Mostly, it’s methane. Except for the smell part. And oil rich California likes cow excrement. A lot. They collect it. And sell it. In “California, this collection of animal excrement is a climate success… The state has enabled farmers and their business partners in California and far beyond to make millions diverting such methane into a web of futuristic machinery that processes and pumps it into natural gas pipelines.

“‘With a good natural gas car, one cow could get you across the country,’ said Neil Black, president of California Bioenergy, which installs the digesters that trap and repurpose the gas. ‘In addition to producing milk and cheese and yogurt and ice cream … each cow produces about 125 diesel gallon equivalents of methane a year.’” Evan Halper writing for the March 29th Los Angeles Times. But like many of these “oh, wow” stories, there’s a catch, a very unpleasant downside, particularly if you happen to be a valuable, gas emitting animal. 

“The methane incentives are so generous that one UC Davis professor warns that the state is nearing a point where it is rewarding production of manure, pushing livestock industries to crowd more of their animals into confinement, and potentially creating more manure — and thus, methane — than otherwise necessary.” Harper. Farmers are also likely to shift from growing lower-profit-making crops, decreasing those supplies (hence raising their prices), to move into more lucrative biofuel harvesting. 

“Separate from the methane push, California’s bullishness on biofuels is also moving some of the country’s large refineries to retrofit their operations to no longer process crude oil. They are shifting to the business of making ‘renewable’ diesel and jet fuel from plants and animal fats… The projected demand California is driving for these ingredients could outpace the supply, which threatens to touch off a range of consequences from increased food costs to a sharp uptick in palm oil production from plantations that are one of the world’s most potent accelerators of global warming.

“‘We don’t have all the right solutions yet,’ said Gene Gebolys, chief executive of World Energy, which has converted a refinery in Paramount into one of the world’s first operations that make jet fuel without using a drop of crude oil. “But the stuff we are working on right now will lead to the right solutions, because it has to. We have no choice but to figure this out. The status quo is not going to work…Regulators are trying to limit ancillary damage to food companies unnerved by its potential to boost the price of cooking oils, fence-line communities warning it creates new pollution threats, and small ag businesses accusing the state of helping factory farms squeeze them out.” Harper. Can you just see this process spiraling completely out of control? 

I’m Peter Dekom, and the laws of unintended consequences seem to be looming large over American cows, pigs… and, well, all kinds of farming and ranching.