Comment by dehrmann
The part that is useful is there's strategic benefit to surplus food production, and it's an outlet for surplus food.
The part that is useful is there's strategic benefit to surplus food production, and it's an outlet for surplus food.
Dairy farmers would never do this. The cost of LNG and methane are far, far too low to justify the costs of digestors, collection and infrastructure. Gasses are waste products that are usually vented to the atmosphere, even in the oil industry. They're dirt cheap.
I worked on a project to make a useful biomass from chicken shit. In the end, after years of research and viable product, it was axed because the upfront costs would always be too high for chicken farmers to adopt it.
The only way to get dairy ops on board would be to mandate it with regulation and then subsidize it. Cattle and dairy ops are massive welfare queens who resist change in every way they can, unless that change is more welfare.
We can't even get landfills to stop leaking/venting methane. No chance we get dairy ops to build methane capture systems.
I've had to build fire & gas detection systems for ~15 diary farm biogas operations in the last two years. It isn't even in our usual list of clients to work with, we just happened to have an oilfield client pass our name around and got calls for these systems a year or two later.
If our tiny company is getting requested to bid on life safety systems for biogas operations it must be a lot bigger of an industry than you believe it to be.
What I meant was we should collect methane to use as fuel in cars. It happens a bunch here in Finland, and driving a biogas car is totally feasible. At some point the government stopped incentivising biogas refueling stations in favour of foreign dependency-riddled and rare earth metal-laden electric cars, which sucks a lot. I think it's pretty significant that you can make an old car basically carbon neutral, instead of buying a Chinese child labour spyware battery on wheels.
Again, American dairy farmers would never adopt this without massive subsidies. Even then they would fight it like they do every environmental regulation(of which there aren't many). If they can't increase profits they will not do it.
Finland is not the US. Americans will try everything else before doing what other countries do because we believe we are different/exceptional.
I agree it's a good idea. It just isn't feasible in the United States for a variety of reasons.
The sensible way to do biofuel is biogas from cattle. It doesn't slot so neatly into the car network (car needs to be modified to have a gas tank (why the heck do you call petrol gas, you nation of fools??)), but actually lowers the climate footprint of cattle farming even before considering the petrol that would be burnt instead of it: Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and eventually burns into CO2 in the atmosphere, so it's better to burn it in an ICE.