Camco is helping the dairy industry benefit from AgMenthane capture technology
New opportunities are emerging in the dairy sector to convert manure into energy, generate environmental benefits such as carbon credits, and create brand differentiation in the marketplace.
Camco has partnered with a large dairy farm and a third party verifier in the United States to qualify and sell the emission reductions from a livestock gas ‘capture and use’ project. The project is now registered with the widely approved Climate Action Reserve (CAR) standard. The farm has been in the dairy business for more than 90 years, is one of the largest dairy operations in Michigan and has the largest herd of registered Holstein cattle in North America.The best designed opportunity to generate carbon credits in animal agriculture is capturing and converting the methane generated by a covered lagoon or an anaerobic digester.
Camco is also working with Ag Business Solutions, a dairy management company with six dairies across several Midwestern states, to turn the methane captured by anaerobic digesters into valuable carbon credits. The projects are also being qualified using the CAR standard and are anticipated to yield significant reductions over a 10-year period from 24,000 cows in Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The business case for carbon credits in the ag methane sector in the US
Economics
Carbon credits can provide added economic incentive to develop a project that wouldn’t otherwise be economically feasible.
Some manure treatment technology has focused on converting manure into energy using energy-recovery systems such as digesters. Using digesters on a commercial scale has been high-risk and high-cost, with more failures than successes. But that’s slowly changing due to the recognition of the environmental benefits provided by clean energy. These benefits can be created and sold as renewable electricity or renewable gas and as carbon credits.
Energy
To promote the generation of electricity from cleaner, renewable sources, states are increasingly passing renewable portfolio standards (RPSs). The end result is that utilities are paying higher prices than ever before for renewable electricity or renewable gas that can be generated on farms from manure.
Environmental benefits
By capturing gas from a covered lagoon or digester and destroying it in a flare or using it as fuel for an electric genset, methane (a powerful GHG) is prevented from entering the atmosphere and is used to replace conventional energy sources. Alternatively, the methane can be scrubbed and inserted into natural gas pipelines, replacing the fossil fuel natural gas.
