Missouri hardly produces any natural gas, unless you count the hogs.
The methane wafting from the manure ponds at swine farms across the state is increasingly funneled into pipelines and delivered to power plants and homes, where it is burned alongside shale gas for heat, hot showers and cooking.
Smithfield Foods Inc., the country’s largest pork producer, expects to be selling gas from all of its Missouri farming operations by summer. Most of its farms already feed methane into the gas grid. Once covers are stretched across the 4-acre lagoons at the rest and then connected to equipment that removes carbon dioxide and impurities from the fumes, Smithfield expects to supply enough gas in Missouri to fuel about 10,000 houses.
“We’ve been looking at how to make energy out of manure for a couple decades,” said
Kraig Westerbeek,
who leads Smithfield’s renewable energy business. “We’ve had some failures, but these projects show that you can actually get it done.”
Companies’ rush to affiliate with the reduction of greenhouse gases is making a big business out of harnessing the methane seeping from heaps of organic waste. So-called renewable natural gas can be produced in commercial quantities at swine and dairy farms, landfills, wastewater-treatment facilities and from spoiled food and slaughterhouse sludge.
Burning it to generate electricity or heat produces no less carbon dioxide than shale gas. But methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Diverting methane from the atmosphere and into the energy grid is treated as a reduction of emissions and rewarded with valuable low-carbon and renewable-fuel credits, which can be traded with or separately from the gas.
Gas from landfills, farms, sewage plants, food waste and other anaerobic digestion systems constitutes less than 1% of U.S. natural-gas supply. The market is swamped with so much shale gas that many oil drillers simply burn their once-valuable byproduct—what they call “trash gas”—at the wellhead rather than spend money piping it to market. On Monday, natural gas futures fell 8.5% to close at $2.305 per million British thermal units, a paltry winter price that falls below break-even for many producers.
Gas from actual trash usually costs many times more. It can’t compete with shale gas without subsidies like fuel credits and its beneficial effect on corporate emissions math.
Analysts and utilities believe renewable natural gas could reach 10% to 30% of total natural-gas supply by 2040. The lower end of that range will still require help from policy makers, the energy industry’s deep pockets and companies eager to burnish their environmental credentials for the…