Green Wombat

photo: stones 55
The California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday gave the green light for Bakersfield startup BioEnergy to supply up to 3 billion cubic feet of bovine biogas – methane extracted from cow manure – to utility PG&E (PCG). As Green Wombat wrote previously, thats enough really natural gas to power 50,000 homes. But the project will start small, with the first methane digester installed at BioEnergy founder David Albers’ own 3,000-cow dairy in Fresno County. The 10-year contract calls for BioEnergy to install digesters – which strip out the potent greenhouse gas methane from cow poop – at dairies around California’s Central Valley. The digesters will scrub the resulting gas of impurities and pipe it to power plants to be used to generate electricity. Ideally, this is a classic win-win for the environment and the economy.

California’s nearly 2 million cows, most living on industrial-scale dairies, create a huge and costly waste problem. According to the PUC order approving the BioEnergy deal, a single thousand-pound dairy cow each day produces 10 pounds of "volatile solids" – that’s bureaucratese for poop – which can be transformed into 72 cubic feet of biogas. Dairy owners can dispose of that burden, clean up the environment and turn crap into cash by cutting deals with companies like BioEnergy. PG&E benefits as the biogas produced counts toward a state mandate that it obtain 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources b y 2010. Such projects typically produce some sort of green "credits" that can be used toward meeting emissions limits or can be sold on carbon trading markets. PG&E will retain some of those so-called environmental attributes produced by the cow power project though the PUC said it remains to be decided just how they might be applied when California’s cap on greenhouse gas limits comes into force.

The BioEnergy contract – and one PG&E has signed with another company, Microgy – covers only a small percentage of California’s bovine biogas production potential. Depending on how dairies are treated under the state’s global warming law, more dairy owners, utilities and entrepreneurs may come to realize the power of cow power.