Two million square miles of permafrost—an area two-thirds the size of the United States has now thawed since the beginning of the 20th century. And all that thawing permafrost is costing the Russian oil and gas industry billions of dollars to repair damaged pipelines and infrastructure as global warming changes the face of western Siberia.

The energy program head of Greenpeace in Russia, Vladimir Chuprov, after interviewing experts at Gazprom, concluded, “For Russia, the biggest threat of the permafrost melt is to oil and gas company infrastructure.” (from Carbon-Based)

Thawing permafrost presents even more of a threat: it could release frozen methane deposits and causing runaway global warming, mass-extinctions, and huge amounts of economic damage to global infrastructure and economic well being. In addition to Gazprom’s, that is.

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Move over CO2—you’ve been ousted, along with methane, as the biggest offenders of global climate change. According to a new a study by Purdue University and NASA, the major chemicals most frequently cited as leading to climate change, namely carbon dioxide and methane, are actually outclassed in their warming potential by compounds receiving less attention. The majority of “greenhouse gases” are created by humans.

The results were discovered when researchers studied more than a dozen chemicals, or greenhouse gases as classified by their warming properties defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. From there, the team developed a blueprint for the underlying molecular machinery of global warming. The results appeared in the November 12, 2009 issue of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Physical Chemistry, just in time for the convergence of world leaders in Copenhagen.

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A landfill gas-to-energy plant in Conestoga, Pennsylvania.

When it comes to corporations fighting climate change, landfill owners don’t necessarily leap to mind. But in Michigan, the landfill industry is working to repeal a 19-year-old ban on the disposal of grass clippings and tree trimmings in dumps — on the grounds that the yard waste, mixed with typical garbage when buried, makes a perfect brew for what it terms renewable methane production.

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I’m probably going to irritate some people with this post.  I apologize in advance because that is not at all my intention.  For those readers that don’t think climate change is a real problem, I respect the fact that there is uncertainty in that science, but if the majority position of climate scientists is true, the stakes in terms of human suffering among the poor are too high not to act.  For those who think Organic farming is the answer, I’m not trying to argue the whole issue here - I just want to talk about the science associated with climate change and farming.  I have spent months reading the scientific literature on this topic.  That science points to some very specific changes in how we need to farm.  If those changes were compatible with Organic I’d be a big promoter.  The short answer is “Organic farming is not the best option from a climate change point of view.”

I know this sounds like heresy in the “Green Blogosphere,” but before you react, please read on.  I agree in advance that the Organic/non-Organic discussion is much broader than climate change.  In fairness, climate change was never something that “Organic” was designed to address either during its origins in the early 20th century or during the development of the USDA Organic rules between 1990 and 2000.  I have no desire to get in the way of Organic growers making a living (including my good friends who grow Organic of the old school category) or get in the way of Organic customers getting what they want.    I simply believe that it is critical that we, the declining subset of people who take climate change seriously, be accurately informed about this issue.  If we believe we “have the answer” for farming when that answer is wrong, that keeps us from continuing to find the real answer.

Focusing on the Major Crops

Because it would be far too complex to discuss this question for all crops,  I’ll only be talking about the “carbon footprint” of the major row crops (see the pie chart above) - the wheat, corn, hay, barley, oats, corn, soybeans, hay, oats, dry beans, lentils… that make up the bulk of our calorie intake, our vegetable protein intake, and our animal feeds for meat and dairy.  Those crops also make up the vast majority of farmed land, so they are what matters for climate change.  Fruit and vegetable crops are extremely important for health and food enjoyment, but not much for climate change.  Organic today is heavily weighted to the fruit and vegetable segment and beyond that, it is extremely small. Actually, all of Organic only represents 2.6MM acres ( ~0.7%  of US cropland), so it has almost no effect on climate either way. This is only a discussion about the widely held opinion that Organic would help in a climate change sense.

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Copper brewhouse in a Trappist brewery

Brewery Waste & Biogas

In the brewery the waste is a collection of unavoidable losses of carbohydrate and protein rich materials, which would otherwise be sold as beer or byproduct and the large quantities of water used to maintain a hygienic operation.

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Wouldn’t it be great if we could kill two birds with one stone? One day, we might be able to, but for now at least one company is working on a way to fix their fuel woes within the confines of their own business.

Waste Management, one of the biggest garbage companies in the country, says it will be able to produce 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) daily from just one landfill in Northern California.

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According to a new report published by the Worldwatch Institute, global emissions caused by the “lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food”  are much higher than previously thought.   Environmental advisers Jeff Anhang and Dr. Robert Goodland, report previous estimates of greenhouse gases caused by livestock were in fact, underestimated.   

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Cow poop is a leading contributor of nitrous oxide and ammonia into the atmosphere, adding heartily to global warming. Cars, as we all know, provide their own fair share of noxious fumes to the environment. But a British team of engineers and racers is working on a way to kill two birds with one stone (metaphorically of course) by developing a race car that can run on cow poop.

Realizing that most technology found in our daily drivers was often first developed for the race track, Oaktec has announced plans to develop a manure-powered rally car, giving all new meaning to the phrase “This car runs like crap!” [ed. note: cow farts and burps contribute far more GHGs than poop, but hey, you gotta start somewhere]

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Desert Hills Dairy of Nevada has joined with Carbon Bank Ireland, an emerging leader in cap-and-trade carbon emissions markets, to build the state’s first biogas facility to convert cow manure into electricity.  Along with producing enough sustainable methane to power itself and other equipment at the second largest dairy in Nevada, the high tech digester will produce liquid fertilizer and mulch.

Carbon Bank Ireland specializes in harvesting certified emissions credits from sustainable energy projects, which can be traded in the European carbon markets. While some pundits claim that cap-and-trade is “socialism on a grand scale” (whatever that is), that doesn’t appear to bother the cows.  It also doesn’t appear to bother Nevada, which sees a lot of green in its future.  As reported by Nevada Appeal writer Kirk Caraway, interest in the state’s rich solar, wind and geothermal resources is surging, and it is becoming a desirable location for start-ups that are developing sustainable projects such as the capture of waste heat and the development of hi tech batteries.  Green jobs, anyone?

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Shaq Wants Your Leftover Beer and Wine for Making Ethanol

First, who ever has leftover alcohol except maybe these guys? The Shaq-backed MicroFueler is a 250-gallon tank for organic feedstock, such as waste wine and beer, that converts it into pure ethanol. It also doubles as a fuel pump and the only waste product is distilled water.

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The conductor walks on to the stage and mounts the podium with applause from the crowd.  He bows to the audience, then turns to his orchestra and, with one fluid motion pulls music from the vast expanse of silence. Each musician moves, almost mechanically, in perfect time, in perfect concert. The violin section becomes one great body, no longer individual musicians. Together, as one, the orchestra ebbs and flows in crescendo and decrescendo. Melody. Harmony. Symphony.

But imagine with me for a moment that one violinist fell out of rhythm. The once fluid sound drips through the cracks of disarray. From there, another violinist. Next a cellist. Soon the entire string section has lost rhythm. The conductor struggles to pull the string section into concert with the rest of the orchestra. However, the chaos of the string section has spread to the brass and to the woodwind sections. Soon the entire orchestra is in conflict.

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When thinking about “carbon footprints” it helps to have real numbers to put things in perspective. The EPA estimates that for the US, agriculture represents about 8% of total human-related greenhouse gas emissions. The following is a list with a little of the detail of what makes up the footprint of an acre of a rain-fed Midwestern corn crop with a few other things thrown in for comparison. Since we grow 80-90 million acres of corn its something that matters. The values are all expressed as pounds of CO2 equivalents. If you want Carbon equivalents multiply by 12/44

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My earlier blog about greenhouse gas emissions from composting generated a lot of good discussion so I am writing to respond.

• Yes, composting is certainly better than some outcomes like food scraps going into a garbage dump which does not do anything to capture the methane

• Yes, an anaerobic digester would be a very good thing to use for most waste streams.  A recent example is what was done at Gill’s Onions

• Many wastes can also be put through a fast-pyrolysis process to form syngas and biochar.  This is another way to get at the carbon-neutral energy that is in the manure or other waste

• Greenhouse gas emissions are not the only metric that matters as was pointed out, but manures in particular are undesirable fertilizers based on multiple other metrics as well: tendency to leach more nitrates because of extended release, more nitrous oxide emissions for the same reason, and excess levels of phosphorus relative to nitrogen leading to water pollution

• Compost is indeed a very good way to build soil carbon and that is a super important thing to do for true sustainable farming, but there are other ways to accomplish that that don’t have the greenhouse gas issues.  One is the use of biochar.  The other is to practice no-till farming and grow cover crops which I describe in another post.

• There may be ways of composting that don’t emit as much methane, but I’ve seen far more theoretical arguments that way with no actual measurements taken.  As a microbiologist I have a hard time imagining how you could avoid having some anaerobic conditions in a big pile of manure.  Starting from 14 times as much carbon equivalents as synthetic nitrogen, the process would have to be vastly improved to be acceptable

• Un-composted manure has similar drawbacks as a fertilizer.  When it is stored for later use on a farm, at least 1-2 percent of its total methane potential gets released even with very good manure management practices

• Chicken manure is more attractive to farmers as a nitrogen source because the levels are higher, but there is every reason to believe it would generate methane in storage and during composting if someone bothered to measure it

360,000 Tons of Watermelon Spoil Every Year in the U.S.

Almost 40% of all watermelons grown here in the U.S. never make it to market due to imperfections, bad spots, or for being oddly shaped (um, haven’t these farmers seen the square ones). But waste not, want not. The watermelon juice could actually be used to produce ethanol.

Truck Runs on 100% Recycled Coffee Grounds

The truck above is powered by a wood gas generator, except it runs fully on coffee grounds. The Cafe Racer is a 1975 GMC pickup that essentially burns used coffee to create a combustible gas. The gas is filtered on its way to the engine. I hope it’s fair trade coffee.

The Innards of 45 Million Turkeys Turned in to Fuel

On Thanksgiving–which is just around the corner–Americans will gobble down over 45 million turkeys. But we don’t eat the whole turkey so slaughterhouses are left with rotting heads, feet and all those innards. So a factory farm in Carthage, Missouri is turning all that waste into fuel using a thermal conversion process from Changing World Technologies.

Guy Builds Engine that Runs on Mountain Dew

Inventor Paul Patone has created the GEET (Global Environmental Energy Technology) Fuel Processor. A mod that allows you to run your car on about 80% water. Or possibly, just a nice cold Tab. He prefers Mountain Dew.

5,000 Miles Traveled Using 80,000 Chocolate Bars

A chocolate powered Ford Iveco Cargo lorry traveled for almost an entire month through France, Spain, Morocco, Mauritania and all the way to Timbuktu and doing so while facing the unforgiving Saharan Desert. The whole trip took about 80,000 chocolate bars.

Farm Saves More Than $700K Using Onion Juice for Energy

Gills Onions has saved a whopping $700K off their electricity bill by using onion juice to power most everything on the farm. They saved an additional $400K just on disposal costs alone. Using an anaerobic digester, they convert onion waste into biogas which is then conditioned and finally turned into methane.

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]]> http://sustainablog.org/2009/07/28/followup-to-an-inconvenient-truth-about-composting/feed/ http://sustainablog.org/2009/07/27/an-inconvenient-truth-about-composting/ http://sustainablog.org/2009/07/27/an-inconvenient-truth-about-composting/#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:16:43 +0000 Steve Savage http://sustainablog.org/2009/07/27/an-inconvenient-truth-about-composting/

Composting is a really green thing to do, right? I’ve always thought so since my Grandfather taught me to do it in the early sixties. Large-scale composting is getting to be quite the rage. The City of San Francisco attracted a great deal of attention with it’s mandatory food scrap recycling program and lots of local wineries are bragging about their use of that compost to fertilize their vineyards.

I just read today about how the Langley Parish Council in England is setting up a village compost and “set an example to small villages as the UK strives to battle climate change.”  Unfortunately, I recently learned that they and San Francisco and the Napa wineries might actually be doing is contributing to climate change.

Climate change science often ends up challenging things we think we know.

Inconvenience

The idea of composting is to provide plenty of moisture and oxygen so that microbes will digest the easily available organic matter and generate a great deal of metabolic heat in the process.  What is left at the end is a sterilized source of more resistant organic matter that can enrich a soil. 

Composting

of wastes is done with very good intentions, but there is the inconvenient truth that even a very well run large-scale compost operation emits some methane.

But if you stop to think about it, as much as you intend to have oxygen available to the whole pile (aerobic conditions), there are definitely going to be micro-sites that are going to lack oxygen (anaerobic conditions) particularly when there is huge oxygen demand during the peak of the process. That is where methane gets made.

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Gills Onions is the largest fresh onion processing plant in the world. The company has more than 15,000 acres of farmland and 300,000 square feet of processing and warehousing facility. Gill was looking for ways to reduce his costs in his farming operation when he began to experiment using the juice from his onion crop in Oxnard, California to create the energy to run his lighting and refrigerators. The result was the creation of an Advanced Energy Recovery System (AERS).

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Permafrost, or permanently frozen ground - soil, sediment or rock that remains at or below 0° Celsius for at least two continuous years - makes up about 24 percent of the exposed land mass in the Northern Hemisphere: that’s approximately 22.79 million square kilometers. Permafrost can be thousands of years old, or it can be just beginning. Either way, as permafrost thaws, it jeopardizes both man-made structures and natural features. Thawing permafrost on mountain slopes can lead to landslides.

And it’s melting.

Besides posing threats to structures and landscapes on a local scale, melting permafrost emits carbon dioxide and methane, according to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), making permafrost a threat on a global scale.

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San Jose, CA - Achieving a goal of 100 percent energy independence is a little closer for San Jose thanks to a momentous move by the City Council today. The City Council authorized the City Manager to negotiate and execute a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop potential lease terms and guidelines for developing an organics-to energy bio-gas facility.

The bio-gas facility, planned to be constructed and operated by Zanker Road Biogas, will be based on a 40-acre site near the San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plan. The proposed facility would also be bound on either side by two solid waste recovery and recycling facilities owned and operated by Zanker Road Resource Management, Ltd.

The MOU, which was authorized today, will set forth the guidelines and work-plan for the potential lease terms of the bio-gas project. Pending successful negotiations for the MOU, San Jose will issue a lease to Zero Waste Energy Development Company, Inc., a partnership between GreenWaste Recovery and their sister company, Zanker Road Resource Management.

This project would also see the cooperation of GreenWaste and Harvest Power, Inc., a company that provides leading technology and project development capabilities for harnessing the renewable energy in organic waste.

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“An invention that is narrowly focused on solving a single problem often inadvertently creates more problems because nature is highly complex and interconnected.” - Javier Fernandez-Han

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