> Kluthe, for example, uses pig manure to power his tractor, which requires engine modifications that would likely violate John Deere's terms of service on newer machines.
> "I take the hog waste and run it through an anaerobic digester and I've learned to compress the methane," he said. "I run an 80 percent methane in my Chevy Diesel Pickup and I run 90 percent methane in my tractor. And they both purr. I take a lot of pride in working on my equipment."
There's also a chance that this violates EPA laws around Tier IV emissions. Totally sympathize with not being able to repair existing equipment but I think it's important to separate it from things that can have emission implications(much in the same way you can't go dumping tons of RF everywhere over protected spectrum on your router).
That said I wonder if Case IH/Claas/etc has similar agreements.
Not sure about the laws in the US, but my wife works as a chemical engineer at a sewage treatment plant here in Sweden and they run _all_ incoming sewage through a aneorobic digester. This generates enough methane to run all the busses in Stockholm and then some. Our car also (VW Passat) also runs on bio-methane.
Important to note that this is 100% carbon-neutral since it uses carbon already in cycle, as opposed to fossil natural gas which adds carbon to the cycle.
Is it true methane is so much worse a geeenhouse gas than co2 ("20x")? Wouldn't that mean him turning methane into co2 is not just carbon neutral, but great for the environment?
> Is it true methane is so much worse a geeenhouse gas than co2 ("20x")? Wouldn't that mean him turning methane into co2 is not just carbon neutral, but great for the environment?
It's true and it actually has a GWP[0] of ~80 over 20 years (so over 20 years a given mass of methane traps 80 times as much heat as the same mass of CO2), although it degrades back to CO2 and water in 12 years. So yes if you're releasing the carbon into the atmosphere either way, it is much, much better to release it as CO2 than as methane.
From what I understood, they were using methane in internal combustion engines, so they are not releasing methane into atmosphere, rather burning it and producing CO2. I would assume that some of the methane is going to end up in atmosphere (engine efficiency, leaking from gas tank), but compare that to untreated pig manure, which would produce said methane anyhow.
Well, we're probably talking about industrial-scale pig farming here. So yes, the carbon in that manure would otherwise likely end up as atmospheric methane. If you applied it sparingly to the soil, much of the carbon would get incorporated into humus. But large pig farms don't have enough land, so they spread thick, and you get methane.
Another issue is that most of the carbon in that manure comes from feed corn. And most of the energy in feed corn comes from ammonia fertilizer, which is made from fossil methane. But hey, it's still a win compared to field spreading.
The discussion is only about the "outflow". The assumption is that you're releasing a set amount of carbon, but you can release it either as methane or as CO2 (and extract some energy out of it in the process).
If this actually is illegal, then Danny Kluthe is doing the opposite of hiding the fact. He even went out to talk to state legislature about it and is actively doing political work around the subject.
A lot of tools can be used for legal and illegal purposes, but in this case there is a lot of eye balls that had all the possibility in the world to claim a case of violated environmental laws and yet clearly that has not happened.
It doesn't lubricate; also gasoline or alcohol doesn't do much there. 4-stroke engines have oil chamber to do it. Nitrogen emissions from the burning process tend to contaminate the oil a bit but overall, CNG and bi-fuel cars are a long-established technology (e.g. I rode in many taxis running on gas in China around the year 2000).
Great point. This isn't like biodiesel or ethanol, where the co2 would end up in the air anyway. A methane generator actively creates a carbon form that is significantly worse for the environment.
Steve Wing, the UNC-Chapel Hill epidemiologist, says hog operations give off ammonia, methane—a potent greenhouse gas—and hydrogen sulfide, which causes headaches and eye irritation. They also release endotoxin, an allergen, and at least a hundred volatile organic compounds, many of which contribute to the odor of hog farms.
[...]
The result? The covers trap odors, making the operation less smelly. Rain falling on the farm isn't contaminated by lagoon waste. And the farm is transforming waste into electricity-generating enough to power 90 refrigerators.
Anaerobic digestion causes the production of (more) methane rather than co2. Methane is a 100x more potent greenhouse gas than co2 over the short term. Over hundreds of years it breaks down but even a century from now it's 30x worse.
Anaerobic digestion is great as long as leaks are kept below 1%. Doing so is tricky.
Over hundreds of years it breaks down but even a century from now it's 30x worse.
That doesn't sound right. Most sources I've seen[1] say that atmospheric methane has about a 10 year half life. I think the 30x figure you refer to actually represents the sum of methane's annual impact over 100 years. Despite the greater immediate efficacy as a greenhouse gas, the amount of methane remaining after a century should be so small that the impact in the 101st year would be extremely (likely unmeasurably) low.
I understand this doesn't affect EPA laws, but most US states exempt farm vehicles, even things like pickup trucks (that can legally drive on roads even) from state emissions testing.
They also allow exemptions to use untaxed fuel in them, etc.
Basically, there's a sort of exemption ecosystem that might have farmers thinking they are free to do whatever they want around fuel and emissions. Which is only partially true...
Yes, but enforcement is aimed at the manufacturer...that new models rolling off the line meet the requirement. I don't believe there's any enforcement locally, for the buyer of the tractor. As mentioned, US states are very lax about farm vehicles.
No. This process is 100% carbon neutral. It recycles the carbon already in the pig manure as opposed to natural gas which is a fossil fuel and adds to the carbon cycle.
Plus locally produced and consumed, so you're not using diesel trucks/ships to move it over long distances (compared to powering his tractor using diesel or gasoline or whatever tractors normally use).
Any lost methane is significantly worse than the equivalent amount of CO2. Even though it's carbon neutral, the intermediate step converts it to a much more potent greenhouse gas that is very easy to lose to atmosphere. Without a digester, the biomass will be converted to co2 instead. Energy that could have been stored as methane is converted to heat. The best case scenario is to skip biology entirely and throw it into the incinerator, where it can be used to produce heat for power and almost only co2, skipping over methane entirely.
Done right, a digester extracts a little bit more chemical energy from biomass that simply leaving it on the ground. Done wrong it weaponizes the carbon.
"Any lost methane is significantly worse than the equivalent amount of CO2."
...except that methane doesn't persist anything like as long as CO2, so while it's mean and pointy upfront, it's out of the environment faster. This is pretty basic climate science that routinely gets misrepresented by the denier industry, which is why I'm bothering to pick this nit.
It's not like he's dumping the methane in the environment though (e.g. dumping manure on a field): it's ultimately being run through a combustion engine.
Well, he is using an anaerobic bioreactor I believe, so not sure what the exact conversion figures or alternative aerobic products would be. (The methane he extracts vs equivalent farm decomposition)
Ethanol is a bad counterexample. Most ethanol comes from corn, and most energy in corn comes from fossil methane, used to synthesize ammonia fertilizer.
Fertilizer only provides the nutrients (primarily nitrogen). The actual energy in corn comes from photosynthesis trapping the sun's energy in chemical bonds.
> We believe that outside certain conditions in the tropics most ethanol EROI values are at or below the 3:1 minimum extended EROI value required for a fuel to be minimally useful to society.
Well, he burns that, he doesn't emit it, so I don't see why that matters. Once burned it seems like the same old CO₂ is emitted, so what he does is a net win... or? I'm not a chemist.
> "I take the hog waste and run it through an anaerobic digester and I've learned to compress the methane," he said. "I run an 80 percent methane in my Chevy Diesel Pickup and I run 90 percent methane in my tractor. And they both purr. I take a lot of pride in working on my equipment."
There's also a chance that this violates EPA laws around Tier IV emissions. Totally sympathize with not being able to repair existing equipment but I think it's important to separate it from things that can have emission implications(much in the same way you can't go dumping tons of RF everywhere over protected spectrum on your router).
That said I wonder if Case IH/Claas/etc has similar agreements.