This California Dairy Farm's Secret Ingredient for Clean Electricity: Cow Poop

[Jilly_in_VA]

It has already proven its worth as a fertilizer and building material, and even as a secret ingredient in Ancient Egyptian ceramics. As it turns out, cow dung might also have a bright future as a plentiful source of clean electricity, thanks to the planet-warming methane it produces.

Few places encompass this potential future better than Bar 20 Dairy, a dairy farm in Kerman, California, which uses methane from cow manure to produce clean electricity with almost zero carbon emissions. It’s the first dairy farm in the U.S. to power its own clean energy “microgrid” using a biogas, and it could be a tantalizing sign of what the future of green energy might look like for companies with access to plenty of methane.

The technology isn’t all that hard to grasp. Manure and waste water from the farm’s nearly 7,000 cows are transported and sifted into a 25-million-gallon rectangular pit in the ground called a digester. The liquid sits for about 30 days while methane gas rises to the top of the closed digester. The gas then gets piped into a skid shifter, which separates the methane from hydrogen sulfide and other impurities. Finally, the methane is piped into fuel cells that harness it to produce electricity with little to no greenhouse gas emissions.

“It’s where Silicon Valley meets the Central Valley,” said N. Ross Buckenham, the CEO of California Bioenergy, a company that operates and builds manure digesters—including the one used by Bar 20 Dairy.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/california-dairy-farm-has-microgrid-powered-by-clean-electricity-made-from-methane-from-cow-poop?ref=home
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Note: Unlike some other farms that use cow poop for energy, this one does NOT use a combustion engine!

[walkingman]

1. This seems a great solution for dairy and feedlots. Recycling and saves money.

[Caribbeans]

2. Another example

The US better get busy NOW

Headline from yesterday

China is beating the world on yet another climate technology.

China’s journey to command the solar market started after heavily-subsidized pioneers in the US and Germany had already laid the groundwork for mass-produced panels. Hydrogen is different; China has long dominated electrolyzer production.
https://qz.com/2117768/china-is-beating-the-world-on-yet-another-climate-technology/

[hunter]

3. Nothing good comes from factory farm dairy and meat production.

It's bad for the environment and bad for the animals. Making a little methane out of manure does not mitigate that.

Personally I don't believe cheap milk and hamburger is any kind of human right. Nobody is going to starve if a gallon of milk or a pound of ground beef from cows raised on grass covered hillsides costs $20.

Land now devoted to feeding factory farm meat and dairy animals could be used to grow other crops that feed people directly, and lands that must be subsidized for farming or have especially onerous environmental impacts could be restored to a somewhat natural state.